Originally Posted by Belligerence:
“On Digital had that 'Champions on 99' channel, didn't they? Not sure if that channel was exclusive to CL football or not; if it was the former I could see why it flopped.”
When it was ONDigital it was indeed shown on a specific channel (two channels, actually, though one was just an opt-out of Carlton Cinema), though in the ITV Digital days it was on the ITV Sport Channel. Course, it was less essential because the only other football they had was the Football League and League Cup so for most fans of top-flight teams there was no reason to subscribe because they'd never be on it. But the USP for ITV Digital is that they had Sky Sports as well so you had to get ITV Digital to get all the football on all channels. But it turned out people were happy to miss what ITV Sport had.
In those days, lest we forget, ITV wasn't on Sky either, so between 2001 and 2003 you went from Sky viewers getting none of it to only Sky viewers being able to see all of it.
Originally Posted by Gray77:
“It's not a big deal if you're a committed football fan who forks out for pay TV to watch games like a lot of us do on here.
But, when people go on about the Champions League as being the pinnacle of European football that means that it is the competition that the most people want to watch, and therefore it should be made available to the most people.”
Yes, I've mentioned it before but even as a non-Man U fan, their run to the final in 1999 felt like a proper big deal, a real event, thanks to its prominent position on ITV. It's like the League Cup, these days the final just seems like any other Premier League game on Sky, whereas if it was still on FTA it would seem special because casual viewers would tune in.
Originally Posted by BenFranklin:
“CL viewing figures on ITV aren't nearly as good as they used to be, easy to get carried around and think it attracts a bigger casual audience than it actually does.”
That's the case with all programming on all channels, though, and can be seen as a side effect of the competition being bigger so that the individual games seem less important, especially in the group stage. And of course more people have Sky and there's more football on FTA TV than there used to be. I used to watch a lot of Champions League ten years ago because it was one of the few chances you had to watch live football on TV.
Still very important for ITV, though, it's one of the few things I watch on that channel.