£100 a match............. (What's your view on the new TV football deals?)

Member Name: rob_writer

Product:	What's your view on the new TV football deals?
Date:	10/08/01 (94 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Pay per vier lets us pick and choose, The new digital features, and now I'm scraping the barrel a bit

Disadvantages: Price, Availability, Price again!

.....could be how much we pay if the current system continues!

It's bloody ridiculous if you ask me. The old deals were bad enough, but the new ones? What is the world coming to when the chances are we might not even be able to watch the next world cup? And then there is the whole pay-per-view fiasco with digital TV.

Recently I have become much less interested in football. The reason I have come up with is a lack of interest in watching results flash up on Grandstand on a Saturday afternoon. It might just be me, but it isn't as fun seeing a few numbers flash up on a screen as it seeing the match. I could of course, listen to the radio, but that?s on par with watching snooker on a black and white TV. Radio is good for talk shows, radio is good for music, but radio is not good for sports commentary.

Of course, I could watch the sports on Sky. If we subscribed to them. We have ONDigital, so can get all the sports channels. At a cost of about £25 per month. That would give you all the Sky Sports channels, but it's still quite steep. If Sky dedicated one of their channels to football then it wouldn't be so bad, but by having 3 Sports Channels which show football you need to subscribe to all three to be certain that you can see all the matches. Even then there was no Saturday matches shown, only Sunday and week day games.

Well, that is how the old system worked. Now there are a whole host of packages and deals that various TV companies have bought up, a lot of which are pay per view. I don't claim to have got my head around them all, but I'll give it a go anyway.

Sky keep their current exclusive premiership rights, so no change there. NTL also managed to snap up some pay per view premiership matches. ONDigital got hold of the other divisions, i.e. the Nationwide Leagues 1,2,3 and 4, as well as the Worthington Cup (yes, some people do still care about that one!). ITV bagged Match of the Day from the BBC,
but the good ol' crew at the Beeb will still have the odd FA cup and European match. Ah, and I forgot to say ONDigital keep their Champions League Coverage.

Confused yet? I am!

Let's take stock of all this shall we! Sky are going to show their premiership games as usual on Sky Sports 1,2,3 and whatever else they have now. NTL will show pay per view premiership games on whatever channels NTL have - I think it's only cable but I would imagine Sky viewers could get them too, although ONDigital viewers probably won't. ONDigital are making a new channel to house their footy, called ITV Sports I think. Viewers will need to pay separately for each of these services, and all this new stuff can only mean they will have to pay more than before. One of ONDigitals' (Oh, I mean ITVDigitals') best pulling points was exclusive and free coverage of the Champions League. That's gone now!

There's even talk of the next World Cup not being shown here due to stupid legal rights and people wanting too much money for it. It's all getting ridiculous to be honest. Money makes the world go round they say, but at the expense of the average footy fan?

So, what are the options? You can either fork out for it all, or forget it. And I know I for one am going to forget it. I was already resigned to listening to matches on the radio and seeing the goals on Match of the Day, but it isn't the same as watching matches. Quite frankly I'm going to get sick of football because I'm unable to watch it. I will quite happily sit and watch snooker or curling on TV, but it's a rare occasion that I sit down to watch a footy match - there simply aren't any on, not unless you're going to pay. And I (or my parents at least) don't think it's worth it, especially not now that you're going to have to pay EVEN more.

What can I say? Get it sorted? It doesn't matter what I think because people will
still pay. I can just about accept the old charges from last season, but with all the different channels and operators involved depending on which TV provider you have you may need to sign up to someone else to be able to watch certain matches. God forbid you only have 5 terrestrial channels!

It's all getting out of hand, wouldn't it be great if we paid a charge to one person, to get one football channel for us all to watch. Even better the BBC could get some footy, but then pigs don't fly!

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