Sky is the best service, for sport, that you'll find anywhere in the world. If you think they're ripping us off you should see what the American & Australian networks get away with, you have to pay for something in one state, that those living there get for free.
Imagine having to pay for tonight's Exiles game, just because we're in Yorkshire and the game isn't.

You have entirely the option of going elsewhere. You have the option of going nowhere. The fact is if you want Sky’s product you pay sky’s prices. If you want a different product, you pay whatever that company charges. Its not Sky’s fault the other television companies sports offering is rubbish compared to theirs. Sky have built a successful business model out of an industry pretty much everyone in this country said would fail. They risked huge sums of money to do this and initially lost loads doing it.

Just because others are being ripped off more than us, does not make it ok.

As for sky sports, I don’t want to pay subsidies for other sports that I don’t give a fig about. I only want to pay and watch a selection of RL games.

Nobody has that product to sell.

It's a good job I never said it was then, isn't it?



So you want a channel that only shows RL then?

I really don't see the big deal here, Sky offer a product which you can either subscribe to or not, they're not forcing anyone to pay.

My Sports part of the package costs £22 per month, for that I get to watch 8 or so live SL games in HD and sometimes in 3D. That's less than £3 per game, add to that SL full time and Boots n All and I don't think that's bad at all.
Then when I combine it with the ICC champions trophy that I'll watch most of the games, the Lions tour of Australia, the US Open Golf, extraordinary coverage of the NFL and a 24 hour sports news channel. I think it's cheap. Then of course there's the Premier League. Bargain.

Why do you consider it a rip-off?


Then get a business plan together and pitch it to some investors. Because the only way you'll get anything like that is to front up and do it yourself.

Precisely.

Certainly in the US it used to be the opposite. Home NFL fans couldn't get live broadcasts, while the rest of the country could. This was to discourage non-attendance at games.

There's no reason something similar couldn't happen over here, although if Manchester United were playing, you'd only be able to watch them in Manchester with the rest of the country on delayed transmission

Not sure about the £3 per game. I work it out to be 22*12/8 = £33 per game.

no worries pal

Eh? Going nowhere is not the same as going elsewhere. You do know that, right?

The problem with allowing Sky to swallow its only real rival in satellite broadcasting is that they now have the monopoly on just about everything (sports, movies, US TV series) because of their size. Whilst the BBC might love to have the rights to live Premier League games, there's no way they'd be allowed to spunk that much of their budget on one item. Other companies just haven't got the financial clout to compete with Sky mainly because their main competitor at the time was assimilated into the Sky machine, and they're too big for anyone else to outbid. The one glimmer of hope is that BT have started to offer some Premier League games for free, but I suspect that this will be a token gesture as they're unlikely ever to be a big enough broadcaster to start outbidding Sky for other sports.

Monopolies only ever benefit one group of people, and it's not the consumer. Would you be so blase about the whole thing if there was only one mobile phone provider in the country?

There isn’t a monopoly in any way shape or form you have other options, you have Virgin media, BT, TalkTalk, youview, freeview, Top up TV. There are high barriers to market, but those barriers were likely higher back when BSKYB first started and they were pumping in £10m a week just to keep going.

If anybody else wanted to put together a viable pay TV package they are free to do so, other companies have done. The fact is it would be very difficult for them to do so, and very expensive, and very risky. But when BskyB created the Pay-tv market in this country it was even riskier, and the costs where still huge and the barriers to market still massive.

I'm glad you said that, as I was confused by that post about America. I always thought that it was set up that you could only watch non-local games live. For a usually purely capitalistic country a always found that idea quite a refreshing one as it encouraged people to support their local club in person. Given our game attendance vs TV attendances it wouldn't be the craziest of ideas to explore here.

Has it changed now?