" Premiership Rugby signs a four-year broadcasting deal with telecoms firm BT worth £152m. "

But they haven't got ads on the side of trucks, Losers!

That's my BT deal cancelled then, I'm not contributing to that

That's a lot of money to pay just to broadcast people kicking for goal.

An interesting deal, not massively more than the RFL broadcasting deal and I wonder what the difference in number of viewers for BT is rather than Sky.

That isnt their sponsorship deal, it is their broadcasting deal.

Might work out as a positive for RL. BT are getting big into sport at the moment, they have a massive investment in sport to fill up their schedules.

They haven’t confirmed how they are going to structure and sell their channel, whether it will simply be on the sky EPG ala ESPN, or whether Sky customers will be unable to access it and it will stand alone on a BT platform.

If it is on a BT platform, there will be much much less access to it than we have with Sky, there will also be less RU shown in Pubs.

This would have a duel benefit of meaning over the next 4 years much fewer people will see RU, and those that do will probably see it much less regularly, with much fewer people stumbling across it.

The 2nd benefit will be that it will make RL more attractive to Sky, and also in 4 years when our tv deal runs out, a credible competitor to Sky for our TV rights.

If I were the RFL/SLE I would approach Sky, see if they want to spend some of the money they aren’t spending on premiership RU next year, and the European RU the years after, on more SL games and possibly, depending on the contract with premier sports, maybe pay for some championship games. Id also possibly speak to some production companies, see if there are any imaginative ideas ideas they have for RL related programmes. Sky will have a bit of time to fill.

What will they be broadcasting on? Not on Sky, not on Virgin...PPV? FreeSat?

Cant see them recouping their payout at all to be honest...

Also, until the FANS and CLUBS take the international game seriously, we will struggle to get this kind of deal.

Yep, although I'm not particularly bothered about how many or few people watch Union on tv, but am more interested in the impact it may have on Sky. Like you say RL may become more important to Sky over the next few years.

Being the forward thinking, professional body that they are, presumably the RFL will already be doing this as a matter of course.

Don't they have their own little platform? BT Vision, a sort of Freeview box connected to the Internet. So, any non-freeview content will be streamed over the Internet.

What is our current deal ith Sky worth out of interest?

Isn't the sky deal for sle £95million over 5yrs?, and this RU deal is £152million over 4yrs?...how is that not massivley more?

I'd agree that fans and clubs need to take the internationals more seriously, but I think we've generally had a decent broadcasting deal. I believe the latest one is £135m not including internationals. Our problem in RL is with sponsors, we're pretty poor at making ourselves (the sport, the clubs, the players, all parts) attractive to sponsors, be it a title sponsor, shirt sponsors, club sponsors/partnerships, or the additional sponsors like official drinks sponsors etc IIRC the RFU recently got a big hotel brand on board (can't remember which, It was either Hilton or Sheraton or something along those lines) as the official Hotel of the England team. I think that's where we let ourselves down rather than the broadcast deal.

I agree with that actually.

The Stobart deal is a case in point
I actually have no problem with them receiving no net income from any such deal - if the publicity was worth it, which the Stobart deal certainly wasnt.

I'd like to know if they even approached any blue chip organisations with a similar proposition - no money takes hands, just one organisation with a big cache is branded as "Official Sponsor of SL" - say Land Rover, Apple, Coke etc.

Also WHY dont RL get brewers sponsoring sports any more?

The current domestic tv deal works out at £27m per year, whereas the new union one works out at £38m per year. It's a little larger difference than I first thought as I'd mistakenly thought our deal was for 4 years but it's actually 5 as you say, but it's not a huge difference I don't think, and shows we aren't getting screwed by Sky or are totally incompetent at negotiating these deals which some people would have you believe.

Like I said in my previous post, it's business sponsorship and partnerships where we struggle IMO.

Yep, like you say the publicity is probably worth more than the £1m we'd get for a title sponsor, as long as its with the right company in the right manner.

I suspect BT will get their fingers burned with this deal - haven't RU bounced between Sky and ESPN in the past? Sky are the major players and I would have thought the benefits in terms of exposure and viewing figures (even though obviously less than live terrestrial) of being on Sky would be a clinching factor if they were in anywhere near the same ballpark. Domestic club RU doesn't get the ratings and it's hard to see how this will pay off - but the people running BT might have some misconceptions about the popularity of the sport....

But I'm sure on the business plan they can make it stack up