Pay-TV broadcasters are in the business of exclusivity, however painful the outcome, writes Julian Clover.
Half of me wants cricket to be screened live on BBC Television, but the other half says that Sky should be congratulated for securing the rights to the summer sport for the next few years, it is after all a pay-TV business and the idea is that it brings in subscribers. Despite the footbalisation of society, there are other sports around, and depending on your country you can swap cricket for ice hockey, handball or cycling.
The BBC’s sports policy, like many terrestrial broadcasters, is in a bit of a muddle. Sports become the flavour of the month, or at least of the rights period, with undue prominence given elsewhere in the schedule for any event where the broadcaster has live coverage. It was curious to hear Sky CEO Jeremy Darroch praising “partners” Eurosport for the HD coverage of the Olympics that it is bringing to the platform. No mention that the BBC’s revitalised HD channel is doing the same, theoretically giving audiences a potential choice of two events.
Having dropped the long running Saturday afternoon sports programme Grandstand the BBC has opted to run different live sports streams under the Red Button. The result is a default sports channel, but because it is part of BBCi, there is no need to put it before the BBC Trust for a Public Value Test. After the Olympics the new sports multiscreen will remain a permanent fixture. This dispels the arguments over scheduling; with its rainbreaks, lunch and tea, cricket is notoriously difficult to schedule, but with 85% of the population multichannel this is hardly an issue any longer.
In the late 1960s ITV had won the rights to screen the Benson and Hedges one-day competition. With just three overs to go in a nail bitingly close final ITV completed its coverage to hand over to the news. The next year the event was back on the BBC.
This time however the BBC chose not to bid, but the protests from the chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board Giles Clarke were a little over the top. If the BBC had bid the effect would have been to force up the price beyond the €300 million paid by Sky. Having bundled together all domestic and international cricket played in England, there was no chance of the successor to the Benson and Hedges Cup finding its way onto terrestrial television, just where is the European Commission when you need it? The Commission forced the Premier League to break up its football packages into six, though anyone thinking there would be live domestic football on the BBC was deluded, the matches ended up on Setanta Sports. Good news for those wanting to see competition in the pay-TV market, bad news for fans that had to buy two subscriptions to see the full programme of matches.
Yet there will be some terrestrial cricket after S4C secured Welsh language rights to five Glamorgan matches from either the Twenty20 Cup or new English Premier League when the new contracts start in 2010. Wonder what the Welsh term is for reverse spin?
