Originally Posted by Rich1977:
“I doubt the ECB will care that much if the money is right, despite the news reports. If that was there was any real concern it would have stayed on FTA in the first place.
Personally I think the rights are going to be split, a small selection for FTA and rest split between SKY and BT like the PL is today. Maybe more televised county cricket matches but split between broadcasters, that way there will be the wider reach they apparently desire.”
Here's how the money has increased in the past 18 or so years.
1999-2002 - live rights shared between Channel 4 and Sky - £103 million
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sport/cricket/194168.stm
2003 - 2005 - shared between Channel 4 and Sky - £150 million
http://www.espncricinfo.com/england/...ry/106481.html
2006 - 2009 - live on Sky only/highlights on Channel 5 - £220 million
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/4097137.stm
2014 - 2017 - live on Sky only/highlights on Channel 5 - £280 million
http://www.espncricinfo.com/england/...ry/551654.html
I appreciate some of those numbers may not be exactly right, and hopefully someone who knows what he is talking about, like mlt11, can correct any mistakes. But assuming they are roughly correct, the money the ECB receives has grown substantially as the live rights increasingly went to Sky.
We can get misty eyed about 9 million people watching the climax of the 2005 Ashes live, but the reality is live Test cricket even on FTA would not draw that many viewers. Three days of every home test match are played when most people are at work. If England are playing somewhere like Australia or India/Bangladesh/Middle East (for Pakistan) a lot of the games are either in the middle of the night or very early in the morning. And watching the full six hours of play per day, in a sport where even the purists would admit there are passages where not a lot is happening, is not something many fans will commit to. Many will dip in now and then, so for an advertiser (who won't know in advance when the match is going to be at peak excitement) they aren't going to expect more than a couple of million viewers average even on FTA. Would the BBC or ITV/Channel 4/5 really be willing to spend anything close to the £70 million a year for the same live rights Sky now have? I just don't see how that would make sense.
I think there are some major differences between the PL split between Sky and ITV and doing something similar for cricket. I don't see the ECB splitting up home test series so e.g. Sky get some matches and BT get others. Would a deal whereby Sky or BT get the live rights to a home series, with e.g. Channel 4 having one live home test work? Maybe, I could see that.
Four day county cricket has so little appeal I just don't see anyone bidding much if anything for it. You only have to look at the pitiful crowds for most games to see that with the England test players turning out for their counties so rarely, and not many overseas players still in their primes, that there's just not enough interest. Maybe BT would do it just to get their foot in the door and build some goodwill within the sport, but the viewing figures would be negligible.