I think on this one, Roy Masters is slightly wrong. Sky did indeed have to fork out more the EPL, but they still make a bid for the NRL. They had been used to paying approx £50,000 per season to cover the NRL, plus sat feeds and studio costs. Setanta offered £500,000 per season, and Sky were willing to up their bid to £100,000 per season, but could see that Setanta were overpaying for the NRL.

Sky's general strategy was to encourage Setanta to pay too much for all their rights, just as it was their strategy with onDigital over the FL rights. Sky's Chris Warren was brought to Setanta to present NRL coverage, but by the time the season came around Setanta had realised that they'd over-paid. Hence Setanta broadcasst the Channel 9 coverage raw.

After losing the rights, Sky put it around that they had never been interested in aquiring the rights, but the reality is more nuanced. They were interested in the rights; but at the right price. Sky's chief strategic aim was to see their rival overpay for sports rights.

The NRL made the classic mistake of taking the short-term route of taking the higher bid. The extra Aus$1,000,000 on offer felt too much to refuse. But in the long run they've been stiffed by the better sports rights poker player, ie Sky. The NRL failed to ask if Setanta had a sustainable business model.

A curiosity is Sky/Fox/NewsCorp's involvement in all of this. Each division is constantly in touch with each other yet they still claim to act independently.

In the next few days (poss weeks), I fully expect Sky to agree to a deal where they cover one game per week. What is holding up the deal is a scheduling problem for Sky. Sat morning's are now dominated by S14. Fridays or Mondays are looking more likely.

The NRL may bring a higher audience, but in the northern hemisphere, NRL sells considerably fewer SS subscriptions than the S14 Union comp. League is obviously a much better sport, but commercially we're a minority sport in comparison to Union. And the proof of that pudding can been seen in the sports pages of UK newspapers on a daily basis.

It is childish to call people trolls just for suggesting that Sky did indeed bid against Setanta for the NRL.

Will do - certainly won't pay for any more subscription channels.

I've just had a representative from Setanta Sport post on my RL forum about pricing and what people's thoughts are on the matter, here's his post.



When he got a couple of replies saying we think it should be free as we pay enough for Sky as it is, we got this reply.



I thought since he only for a handful of replies over on RLforums, I would open the topic upto people on here and direct him to this thread.

Not too bad as we were paying £15 or so for Setanta before it became free on Virgin. Speaking of which, ask him if PS will become available on Virgin any time soon.

That and Magners, Microforce, Paint Runner getting sick of those adverts now.

£5.99 a month wouldn't be too bad, they should try to grab some more NRL games that the betting sites currently stream though to make it even better value, like the Monday games. They also need to improve their picture quality, I don't expect HD picture quality but it needs to get better.

It will need to be a monthly contract that people can cancel when the NRL season is over.