Sky Sports

So that's both of our home games against the old firm televised on Sky Sports meaning we are again shafted from getting a bumper order on our coverage whereas the corresponding fixtures maximize benefits for the old firm.

TBH its just as well we managed to get money for Lyndon Dykes else we'd already be in pretty dire financial circumstances. With so many lower league sides needing support during the pandemic; I imagine the compensation to the home televised side is pretty poor.

We have one more home game against the old firm (Sevco) after the Celtic one and before the split - does anyone want to put money on that one not also being televised?

Ross County were lucky enough to get their home game against an arse cheek on their ppv, would be interesting to know how much they made. A lot of fans look for free streams too right enough, had to go on one for our game against Celtic because they don't do ppv, only their ST holders that get to watch the game on their stream.

Was interesting that the Celtic fans actually thought they should be entitled to see their game against Ross County on the ppv stream for free, even after it was explained to them it wasn't Celtic's stream, they thought County should've been giving them access to it through Celtic FC, and it included on their ST, and moaned like feck about having to pay for it. Like every other club's fans have had to do for away games, like they're special and above doing what the rest of us do.

The thing that gets me is people bleat on about Sevco matches only costing £12 to watch whereas ours are £20. There's a reason for that; Old Firm games aside (which is pretty much always the case) they continue to have their season ticket sales PLUS PPV games revenue almost complete. However, other sides that need the revenue, are continually shafted.

You are correct D, however would you rather have 10 folk paying £20 or 20 folk paying £12?

I have no idea how many folk are tuning in or how many of them are doing so as part of their ST but while we have priced it based on our required income it is quite clear from my simple example above that a cheaper rate would probably entice more people (especially away fans) & thus produce greater income. I know that I would not pay £20 to watch one of our away games unless it was a Cup Final or a big league position decider so I suspect many away fans have been put off by our price.

The clubs pricing the ppv's all differently doesn't help, maybe if they'd just all agreed to charge £15 and then there wouldn't be any complaints.

What Bertie is saying is true though, every match thread i've seen on P&B away fans are saying they wont pay £20 for it, but would've had it been £15. The hesgoal (think that's the name) makes it possible to watch games for free, on a dodgy stream, and tbh some of the ppv aren't that much better quality, but i'd rather pay money to the clubs for their ppv, others may not though.

Only the club will know how much they're making from it, hopefully they all share stream figures to compare the uptake differences with the varied prices.

Bertie Bassett wrote:You are correct D, however would you rather have 10 folk paying £20 or 20 folk paying £12?

I agree that £20 seems too high but I'm not sure to what level we're able to adjust this. Normally an operation service agreement can be set by one of two principle method:

1. Set service cost e.g. agreement is made with the third party supplier to provide the streaming cost for say £10,000 per month; on average you would hope for two home games per month so you could recoup the cost for about 250 viewers per game. Of course if you ended up with only one home game then the pressure build.

2.  Percentage of the number of viewers income i.e. the supplier might take say 60% of the revenue) based on projected viewing numbers, and the remainder is given to the club to try to meet their operating costs.

The second option would possibly work out more expensive but represents significantly less risk. If you weren't comfortable about the potential viewing number or were concerned about possible pirate feed then the second option might be the most risk adverse.

However, assume for example that the second option was taken but with the proviso that all season ticket holders got "free" access, so that the club didn't have to stump up £12 each time a season ticket holder logged on, then that would be the safest of all worlds. Season ticket holders are happy, no big bills at the end of the month, the club retains full season ticket money to support the daily running costs and any PPV revenue is a bonus.

However if the PPV price was then reduced to say £12 then that would result in the club betting bu@@er all from televising the game.

As a lot of this was negotiated before the Dykes sale went ahead; I wouldn't be surprise if the club had opted for the safest of all scenarios.

Yeah, I realise my example is simplistic but the principle still applies.

That said our crowds when we reduced walk up prices for cup ties in the BC era rarely showed any kind of marked increase on the regular crowd size. Which forces the club to set the price higher than anyone really wants.

LF’s point is well made though, all the clubs should have negotiated to have a flat rate for all.

Bertie Bassett wrote:Yeah, I realise my example is simplistic but the principle still applies.

That said our crowds when we reduced walk up prices for cup ties in the BC era rarely showed any kind of marked increase on the regular crowd size. Which forces the club to set the price higher than anyone really wants.

LF’s point is well made though, all the clubs should have negotiated to have a flat rate for all.

Yes; effectively the law of diminishing returns.

However using the sevco example and my costings above - assuming they had forecast for getting 50k PPV and season ticket holders signing up for an ibrox match, and they'd selected the 10k monthly charge above with two game in the month, they'd be making £11 profit from every punter logging on which is precisely £11 more than we'd be making at a £12 PPV.

One other thing to consider though is at the time of negotiation no-one would have had any idea of how long the season would last of whether it would go on for more than a handful of games; alternatively there was a suggestion that there could be an isolation period between each competitive game played resulting in possibly only one or two games being played per month. At the time I think a lot of the smaller clubs were backed into a corner and had to take the only feasible option available.

Ideally this should have all been centralised and organised by the SPFL; they could even have introduced a scheme were all season ticket revenue is retained by the home club but all PPV profit was split equally between all clubs regardless of size. That would hopefully have also given better support for the lower league clubs. Of course there would be no windfall games where one of the old firm sides played at one of the smaller sides, for example, but with all our gate money being lost to Sky that would hardly impact us.