Originally Posted by Sirius C:
“I've read this post a few times now as it's near the top of the page, but do the stats not argue against the point you are trying to make?
As the number of games on Sky Sports has rose from 60 (in that period) to 126 at present so has the number of subscribers. Sky, in 1996, was relatively expensive to only see your team 3 or 4 times per season and against strong coverage of European football (where there was UK interest) and FA Cup, England internationals on terrestrial television.
As more football has gone behind a paywall the number of subscribers has steadily rose. While Sky now have competition from other broadcasters, they have always been in a position to say there's more football than ever before on Sky Sports, at least until they lost the Champions League.”
Not sure you registered my point about FA Cup and England - my point was that back in 1997
Sky had all 1st pick FA Cup games and England internationals - whereas they don't now.
Yes, I agree with your point that Sky obviously has more PL games now - 126 vs 66 back in 1997.
But how key has the increase in PL games been to driving more subs?
We can't prove it either way but my view is that the extra games haven't been
that significant - yes they will have driven some extra subs but Sky has gone from 3m to 10m subs - my view is that the extra PL games would only have taken them to say 4m, or maybe 4.5m.
The reason I think that is as follows:
On one side of the coin they have the extra PL games. But we know that the average Sky subscriber only watches 30 games per season and I don't think that figure has changed much - putting on more live games hasn't grown the number of games each subscriber watches - at least not much. Although I would agree that people are being served better by being more able to watch the games they most want to see (ie your point that the team you personally support is on more).
Now look at what is on the other side of the coin:
1) Sky now has a competitor offering a reasonable helping of PL games at much lower cost. No competitor existed in 1997.
2) Sky has lost the 1st pick FA Cup and England games it had in 1997. So back in 1997 Sky had literally every one of the biggest games across all of PL, FA Cup and England - now they have say 75% of PL, but no FA Cup and no England.
My own view (and I accept it can't be proved either way) is that the reason they have made such a transformational change in size from 3m to 10m subs is much
more because of:
- Other sports rights acquisitions - making their sports offer much broader - most importantly adding cricket and F1 but also numerous other additional sports content
- A much broader entertainment offering - Sky Atlantic etc
- Launching broadband and phone and bundling with TV
- Various technological developments
Indeed Sky got out of that late 1990s stagnant phase with the launch of Sky Digital - which immediately led to the number of Sky TV subs growing very rapidly - when the number of live PL games they had was flat.
I also think that the % of Sky homes taking Sky Sports is lower now than back in 1997 - though Sky hasn't published these figures since (from memory) 2007 - I don't have any such figures for the late 1990s but my general impression is quite strong that the figure (ie the % not the absolute number) would have been higher in the late 1990s.