2016 - 2017 Football Thread - Page 82

On November 08 2016 14:05 WillyWanker wrote:
I wonder why no one is trying to do a Netflix of sports...
On-demand subscriptions to your favorite teams/competitions would sell so easily. Every country has their own TV rights but it's such a bad user experience. TV is outdated, streaming your computer to your TV or using a smart TV is super easy now. On-demand games with the choice of the commentary language... Maybe one day it'll happen. Only a huge, rich group could buy enough TV rights to make that a reality..

Television viewership of Sky Plc’s flagship Sunday late-afternoon soccer game has fallen by 19 percent this season, the biggest drop yet in a five-year slide in the U.K. that raises the risk that a decline in subscribers may follow.

After eight games, the average audience for pay-TV provider’s “Super Sunday” English Premier League match is 1.03 million viewers, according to data from the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board. That’s down 39 percent from a peak of 1.68 million viewers in 2011-2012. The 4 p.m. slot, a fixture for Sky since 1992, is part of an overall drop in its Premier League viewership this year, a concern for investors after the company paid 4.17 billion pounds ($5.17 billion) in its latest three-season contract with the league.

The audience drop, familiar to U.S. broadcasters contending with shrinking ratings for some sports, highlights the global squeeze on media companies as viewers move online and onto mobile devices. Sky, whose largest shareholder is Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox Inc., is paying record sums to air the world’s richest soccer league and keep ahead of BT Group Plc, which broadcasts some Premier League games. While Sky held on to most matches, it’s still losing viewers, and there’s no guarantee the outlay will prevent subscriber losses.

“Viewership stats such as that can often be seen as a precursor to churn increasing,” said Neil Campling, an analyst at Northern Trust Securities LLP in London, referring to the industry performance indicator for customer attrition. “These are big changes. These are not two, three percent declines. These are potentially quite significant.”

The BARB data show the full-season average audience has fallen each year since 2011-2012, including the first eight games of the current 2016-2017 season. The figures are similar when comparing the first eight games of each season with this year’s start, though not all five seasons show a drop.

Sky executives have blamed the tough start on competition from the Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics and the 2016 European soccer championship.

In response to the Sunday decline, Sky said that overall, it’s shown 19 of the 20 most-watched Premier League matches in the season that started in August. The company also said BARB data doesn’t include audiences for its Now TV digital service or Sky Go mobile package -- figures Sky doesn’t release. The broadcaster said that it is actually drawing more viewers when lower-tier divisions such as the Championship are included.

“There are of course a number of factors which affect short-term year-on-year viewing trends, with the Olympics this season being a good example, but what is important is we have seen growth in viewing across domestic football and our whole sport portfolio year on year,” Barney Francis, managing director of Sky Sports, said in an e-mailed statement. “While the data doesn’t reflect the total picture, what we see at Sky is even greater audiences engaging in the way that suits them best.”

Overall, Sky is still adding subscribers, though growth has slowed. It gained 35,000 customers in the U.K. and Ireland in the fiscal first quarter, about half as many as the 77,000 additions a year earlier. But a rising churn rate, a rolling measure of customer attrition over the past year, suggests marketing costs are on the rise, Campling said. There’s also a risk that there’s simply too much saturation of sports content and viewers are getting turned off, he said. Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN lost 621,000 subscribers from October to November, according to Nielsen data.

On November 10 2016 05:36 mahrgell wrote:


There is no shame in not knowing the subs of teams that can't even make it to the Euro.