No Use For A Name
14-05-2007, 05:03 AM
From Here (http://au.fourfourtwo.com/forums/default.aspx?g=posts&t=167)
A-League on channel 9?
http://www.knowfirst.info/forums/showthrea...ted=1#post73812 (http://www.knowfirst.info/forums/showthread.php?p=73812&posted=1#post73812)
http://www21.sbs.com.au/wgforum/viewtopic.php?t=86315
Massive rumor about this...
Im not sure how its possible due to clashes with the cricket that would occur.
I got strange feeling channel 9 may have brought the highlights package....more than 1 live game per week..
Not sure how i feel about it
Also terrific recent article by Les Murray on the issue
The English FA has come under fire recently, not just for the drab national team it has put out, but for a landmark television deal that took the broadcast rights to all games involving England and the FA Cup away from the BBC.
The rights were awarded to (free to air) ITV and (pay operator) Setanta whose combined offer of over $1billion will leave the Beeb with little involvement in football at the end of its current rights contract in 18 months time.
Nothing unusual or outrageous in that, given the commercial climate in which football now lives.
What raised eyebrows and ruffled some feathers was the timing of the decision, coming just days after the BBC’s on-air hosts and pundits made heavy criticism of England’s performances in the Euro 2008 qualifiers.
The London Daily Telegraph reported: “Criticism of the England team from BBC pundits Gary Lineker and Alan Hansen played an important part in the Football Association’s decision to dump them and instead award their television rights to ITV and Setanta in a 425 million pound deal.”
“According to sources, the FA felt the BBC’s coverage of the national team, both under present coach Steve McClaren and his predecessor, Sven-Goran Eriksson, was bordering on a ‘campaign’.”
“It is understood Lineker was told by a senior FA official that there was serious concern inside Soho Square [the FA’s headquarters]that the BBC’s reporting of the England team ‘was not as positive as it should be’.”
If true, it is of course a disgrace. What is a television network expected to do, much less an august one like the BBC, other than tell the truth, as it sees it, no matter what rights it holds?
If true, the FA has taken a position of infantile bitchiness and naiveté.
Partnerships between sports bodies and their broadcasters ought to be genuine but they are meant only to be of a business not editorial nature, rooted in a mix of the rights fee, the network’s commitment to expose and promote the sport, and the potential size of its audience.
It does not profit the deal, or either body, if the broadcaster’s credibility is eroded by its willingness to soft-step on comment and ‘suck up’ to its partner. A commercially useful television partner is one that appears editorially strong, credible and independent, whatever the commercial arrangements between the two parties. The broadcast partner is part of the sports body’s marketing mechanism, not its publicity mouthpiece.
In any case, I don’t believe the FA dumped the Beeb because Lineker and Hansen had unkind things to say about the England team. They are neither that stupid nor that commercially naïve. It was surely the moola. The FA, like its FFA counterpart here, simply wants and needs the money.
Which brings me to the situation in Australia as it relates to television coverage of football.
For the best part of three decades, television coverage of football was almost the monopoly domain of SBS. This was not of SBS’ own making or even strategy, at least at first. It was just that no other network was interested in football and SBS simply moved in to the vacuum. It was part of the SBS charter to be ‘worldly’ and because football was the most worldly of sports, SBS did its duty by covering it, exposing it and promoting it.
Things began to change in the late 1990s, by which time football had begun to crack the mainstream of Australian consciousness and in 1997 the Australia v Iran World Cup qualifier, on SBS, drew four million viewers.
Suddenly SBS began to have competition. The Seven network pounced on the new opportunity but made a major blunder by burying it and starving it of airtime.
The deal, worth $24 million over ten years, was seen as counter-productive by the football public and leaflets proclaiming ‘nobody screws soccer like Seven’ were floating everywhere. Football, with no television exposure, was bleeding. Crowds were dwindling and sponsors, like Ericsson, were walking away.
But by that time in the wings, growing, financially stashed and bold, was Pay TV, which saw football as a virgin and vulnerable terrain to exploit.
The English Premier League was its first booty. There was a sweet co-existence between Fox Sports and SBS as joint broadcasters of the EPL between 1998 and 2004 but then things began to change again. Fox paid big bucks for the rights, demanded exclusivity, and the EPL disappeared from free TV.
As Fox’s revenues began to swell, ‘soccer’ was now a big ticket item and football was Pay TV’s oyster. Soon the European Championship went to Pay. The Serie A and the Primera did, too (to ESPN). As did the UEFA Champions League and the FA Cup, although not exclusively.
Then along came Crawford and Lowy, bringing a massive boom in the local game and dramatically heightening its appeal, and the pointy end of Australian football, the Socceroos and the A-League, were snapped up by Pay, for a fortune desperately needed by the FFA and willingly paid by Fox.
In the past few years an additional competitor to the free-to-air players, Setanta, also took root in the Australian market with its network of private venues – clubs and pubs – cornering mostly the bigger profile World Cup and European Championship qualifiers.
Recently the balance of SBS’ football coverage came under some criticism and was accused of being Anglo-centric for screening the consecutive Israel v England and Andorra v England games. The truth is that not much else was available. Setanta had snared, for fees way beyond SBS’ budget, the higher profile games and put them in to its clubs and pubs, including the emotion-driven Greece v Turkey.
Of course, what has allowed the Pay operators such easy access to this content is that the richer commercial free-to-air networks, Seven, Nine and Ten, were not sufficiently interested to compete for football.
They do have the money (have a look at what they pay for AFL or rugby league), but while these networks might be titillated by the odd Australia v Uruguay qualifier or the top handful of games in the World Cup, they will stay clear of long-term commitments to football because it is still not a consistent, long term rater.
The way it works is that commercial free-to-air networks are interested in ratings, or volumes of viewers, to satisfy their advertisers, while Pay TV is driven by paying subscribers.
The gap in critical mass that separates the two is huge. Anything under 500,000 viewers hardly makes a beep on the free-to-air radar. But just 10,000 viewers, at say $60 a month per viewer (you do the sums), is already decent dosh to a Pay network.
These are the realities of the modern day relationship between football and television. Football now represents serious, ready cash, thanks to Pay TV, and financial opportunities have shoved to the back of the queue the game’s need to be broadly exposed, paraded and placed in the shopwindow.
This is not ideal but understandable, given that TV money provides the riches needed to sustain the game, here and everywhere else in the world. It would be hard to fathom how the bleeding A-League may have survived had it not been for the Fox deal, reputedly worth $130 million over seven years.
That said, free-to-air coverage of football is still desperately needed and far from dead or even dying. The two most elite of the world’s football tournaments, the World Cup and the UEFA Champions League, parading the world’s best teams and players, both remain on free-to-air and will do for some time. SBS has rights to the World Cup until 2014 and to the Champions League until 2009.
Additionally, SBS will continue to air products and events that are away from the so-called mainstream, like the Copa America, the African Cup of Nations, the Club World Championship etc. SBS has the rights to all the FIFA events – the Women’s World Cup, the various youth World Cups etc – till 2014, another 26 world tournaments.
One reason is that the vendors of those events have a strategic preference for free-to-air exposure, or brand building. They have no appetite for ‘hiding’ their products on Pay TV. Currently a like football product will attract on free-to-air roughly five times the audience it will bring on Pay TV. So if a game brings in 20,000 viewers on Pay, the same game will attract 100,000 on free to air.
Extending that, if the A-League grand final last February attracted 280,000 viewers on Pay, which it did, it is probable that it would have brought in an audience of well over a million had it been on free TV.
It is little wonder why most sports promoters, beholden to their sponsors and their need to build their brands, have a preference for free-to-air television exposure. If all things were equal in a rights auction, including the size of the fee, the rights would always go to free-to-air because only on free-to-air will you get new customers and gain market penetration. Pay TV only caters for the already converted because only they, football fans, will pay to watch football.
Another factor is Australia’s anti-siphoning laws, which protect certain events from being siphoned off by Pay TV and so deny the public’s right to view them for free. The World Cup is so protected but, strangely, games involving the Socceroos or the A-League are not.
Hence the recent deal that had the television rights to our national football team, and our elite football league, signed away to Pay until 2013. It was all done within the law and with commercial realities in play. Nobody can be blamed, not the FFA, which was desperate for the money, not SBS, which is playing with tax-payer dollars, and certainly not Fox, which is in the business of being in business.
The only party that remains muddied in all this is the Federal Government which, for whatever mysterious reason, has chosen not to protect the Socceroos and the A-League for free TV.
The irony in all this is that Pay TV, however rich, bold and ambitious, still has a critical need to have maintained free-to-air TV coverage of football, as much as it might be reluctant to admit it. It is free TV, with its large access to audiences that has the capacity to promote and act as an agent, which drives newcomers to the game.
One TV executive once made the comment to me that, far from SBS having to pay for the rights to the EPL highlights show, it should receive payment from Fox for providing the airtime for a program that acts to promote the EPL and drive audiences to Fox’s live EPL games.
He had a point.
That said, this column is not meant as a bitch at Pay TV, which has a valuable place in the life of the modern consumer. I am a Foxtel subscriber and watch it relentlessly, grateful, as a football nut, that I can now access five or six top live games per week, which no free to air network could ever supply. Free to airs simply don’t have the airtime.
And multi-channelling is not a solution because, under current legislation, SBS, for instance, is not permitted to air live sport on its secondary channels.
Almost everywhere in the world there is both free-to-air and Pay coverage of the top football properties and that is the way it should be. There is surely a place for both.
* If you have any questions about today’s relationship between football and television, I will be happy to answer them. Drop me a line at twg@sbs.com.au
A-League on channel 9?
http://www.knowfirst.info/forums/showthrea...ted=1#post73812 (http://www.knowfirst.info/forums/showthread.php?p=73812&posted=1#post73812)
http://www21.sbs.com.au/wgforum/viewtopic.php?t=86315
Massive rumor about this...
Im not sure how its possible due to clashes with the cricket that would occur.
I got strange feeling channel 9 may have brought the highlights package....more than 1 live game per week..
Not sure how i feel about it
Also terrific recent article by Les Murray on the issue
The English FA has come under fire recently, not just for the drab national team it has put out, but for a landmark television deal that took the broadcast rights to all games involving England and the FA Cup away from the BBC.
The rights were awarded to (free to air) ITV and (pay operator) Setanta whose combined offer of over $1billion will leave the Beeb with little involvement in football at the end of its current rights contract in 18 months time.
Nothing unusual or outrageous in that, given the commercial climate in which football now lives.
What raised eyebrows and ruffled some feathers was the timing of the decision, coming just days after the BBC’s on-air hosts and pundits made heavy criticism of England’s performances in the Euro 2008 qualifiers.
The London Daily Telegraph reported: “Criticism of the England team from BBC pundits Gary Lineker and Alan Hansen played an important part in the Football Association’s decision to dump them and instead award their television rights to ITV and Setanta in a 425 million pound deal.”
“According to sources, the FA felt the BBC’s coverage of the national team, both under present coach Steve McClaren and his predecessor, Sven-Goran Eriksson, was bordering on a ‘campaign’.”
“It is understood Lineker was told by a senior FA official that there was serious concern inside Soho Square [the FA’s headquarters]that the BBC’s reporting of the England team ‘was not as positive as it should be’.”
If true, it is of course a disgrace. What is a television network expected to do, much less an august one like the BBC, other than tell the truth, as it sees it, no matter what rights it holds?
If true, the FA has taken a position of infantile bitchiness and naiveté.
Partnerships between sports bodies and their broadcasters ought to be genuine but they are meant only to be of a business not editorial nature, rooted in a mix of the rights fee, the network’s commitment to expose and promote the sport, and the potential size of its audience.
It does not profit the deal, or either body, if the broadcaster’s credibility is eroded by its willingness to soft-step on comment and ‘suck up’ to its partner. A commercially useful television partner is one that appears editorially strong, credible and independent, whatever the commercial arrangements between the two parties. The broadcast partner is part of the sports body’s marketing mechanism, not its publicity mouthpiece.
In any case, I don’t believe the FA dumped the Beeb because Lineker and Hansen had unkind things to say about the England team. They are neither that stupid nor that commercially naïve. It was surely the moola. The FA, like its FFA counterpart here, simply wants and needs the money.
Which brings me to the situation in Australia as it relates to television coverage of football.
For the best part of three decades, television coverage of football was almost the monopoly domain of SBS. This was not of SBS’ own making or even strategy, at least at first. It was just that no other network was interested in football and SBS simply moved in to the vacuum. It was part of the SBS charter to be ‘worldly’ and because football was the most worldly of sports, SBS did its duty by covering it, exposing it and promoting it.
Things began to change in the late 1990s, by which time football had begun to crack the mainstream of Australian consciousness and in 1997 the Australia v Iran World Cup qualifier, on SBS, drew four million viewers.
Suddenly SBS began to have competition. The Seven network pounced on the new opportunity but made a major blunder by burying it and starving it of airtime.
The deal, worth $24 million over ten years, was seen as counter-productive by the football public and leaflets proclaiming ‘nobody screws soccer like Seven’ were floating everywhere. Football, with no television exposure, was bleeding. Crowds were dwindling and sponsors, like Ericsson, were walking away.
But by that time in the wings, growing, financially stashed and bold, was Pay TV, which saw football as a virgin and vulnerable terrain to exploit.
The English Premier League was its first booty. There was a sweet co-existence between Fox Sports and SBS as joint broadcasters of the EPL between 1998 and 2004 but then things began to change again. Fox paid big bucks for the rights, demanded exclusivity, and the EPL disappeared from free TV.
As Fox’s revenues began to swell, ‘soccer’ was now a big ticket item and football was Pay TV’s oyster. Soon the European Championship went to Pay. The Serie A and the Primera did, too (to ESPN). As did the UEFA Champions League and the FA Cup, although not exclusively.
Then along came Crawford and Lowy, bringing a massive boom in the local game and dramatically heightening its appeal, and the pointy end of Australian football, the Socceroos and the A-League, were snapped up by Pay, for a fortune desperately needed by the FFA and willingly paid by Fox.
In the past few years an additional competitor to the free-to-air players, Setanta, also took root in the Australian market with its network of private venues – clubs and pubs – cornering mostly the bigger profile World Cup and European Championship qualifiers.
Recently the balance of SBS’ football coverage came under some criticism and was accused of being Anglo-centric for screening the consecutive Israel v England and Andorra v England games. The truth is that not much else was available. Setanta had snared, for fees way beyond SBS’ budget, the higher profile games and put them in to its clubs and pubs, including the emotion-driven Greece v Turkey.
Of course, what has allowed the Pay operators such easy access to this content is that the richer commercial free-to-air networks, Seven, Nine and Ten, were not sufficiently interested to compete for football.
They do have the money (have a look at what they pay for AFL or rugby league), but while these networks might be titillated by the odd Australia v Uruguay qualifier or the top handful of games in the World Cup, they will stay clear of long-term commitments to football because it is still not a consistent, long term rater.
The way it works is that commercial free-to-air networks are interested in ratings, or volumes of viewers, to satisfy their advertisers, while Pay TV is driven by paying subscribers.
The gap in critical mass that separates the two is huge. Anything under 500,000 viewers hardly makes a beep on the free-to-air radar. But just 10,000 viewers, at say $60 a month per viewer (you do the sums), is already decent dosh to a Pay network.
These are the realities of the modern day relationship between football and television. Football now represents serious, ready cash, thanks to Pay TV, and financial opportunities have shoved to the back of the queue the game’s need to be broadly exposed, paraded and placed in the shopwindow.
This is not ideal but understandable, given that TV money provides the riches needed to sustain the game, here and everywhere else in the world. It would be hard to fathom how the bleeding A-League may have survived had it not been for the Fox deal, reputedly worth $130 million over seven years.
That said, free-to-air coverage of football is still desperately needed and far from dead or even dying. The two most elite of the world’s football tournaments, the World Cup and the UEFA Champions League, parading the world’s best teams and players, both remain on free-to-air and will do for some time. SBS has rights to the World Cup until 2014 and to the Champions League until 2009.
Additionally, SBS will continue to air products and events that are away from the so-called mainstream, like the Copa America, the African Cup of Nations, the Club World Championship etc. SBS has the rights to all the FIFA events – the Women’s World Cup, the various youth World Cups etc – till 2014, another 26 world tournaments.
One reason is that the vendors of those events have a strategic preference for free-to-air exposure, or brand building. They have no appetite for ‘hiding’ their products on Pay TV. Currently a like football product will attract on free-to-air roughly five times the audience it will bring on Pay TV. So if a game brings in 20,000 viewers on Pay, the same game will attract 100,000 on free to air.
Extending that, if the A-League grand final last February attracted 280,000 viewers on Pay, which it did, it is probable that it would have brought in an audience of well over a million had it been on free TV.
It is little wonder why most sports promoters, beholden to their sponsors and their need to build their brands, have a preference for free-to-air television exposure. If all things were equal in a rights auction, including the size of the fee, the rights would always go to free-to-air because only on free-to-air will you get new customers and gain market penetration. Pay TV only caters for the already converted because only they, football fans, will pay to watch football.
Another factor is Australia’s anti-siphoning laws, which protect certain events from being siphoned off by Pay TV and so deny the public’s right to view them for free. The World Cup is so protected but, strangely, games involving the Socceroos or the A-League are not.
Hence the recent deal that had the television rights to our national football team, and our elite football league, signed away to Pay until 2013. It was all done within the law and with commercial realities in play. Nobody can be blamed, not the FFA, which was desperate for the money, not SBS, which is playing with tax-payer dollars, and certainly not Fox, which is in the business of being in business.
The only party that remains muddied in all this is the Federal Government which, for whatever mysterious reason, has chosen not to protect the Socceroos and the A-League for free TV.
The irony in all this is that Pay TV, however rich, bold and ambitious, still has a critical need to have maintained free-to-air TV coverage of football, as much as it might be reluctant to admit it. It is free TV, with its large access to audiences that has the capacity to promote and act as an agent, which drives newcomers to the game.
One TV executive once made the comment to me that, far from SBS having to pay for the rights to the EPL highlights show, it should receive payment from Fox for providing the airtime for a program that acts to promote the EPL and drive audiences to Fox’s live EPL games.
He had a point.
That said, this column is not meant as a bitch at Pay TV, which has a valuable place in the life of the modern consumer. I am a Foxtel subscriber and watch it relentlessly, grateful, as a football nut, that I can now access five or six top live games per week, which no free to air network could ever supply. Free to airs simply don’t have the airtime.
And multi-channelling is not a solution because, under current legislation, SBS, for instance, is not permitted to air live sport on its secondary channels.
Almost everywhere in the world there is both free-to-air and Pay coverage of the top football properties and that is the way it should be. There is surely a place for both.
* If you have any questions about today’s relationship between football and television, I will be happy to answer them. Drop me a line at twg@sbs.com.au