As Inter-County teams prepare to gather again from Monday the GAA has been putting the finishing touches to preparations on how we will get to see the games they play when action resumes in the Allianz Leagues and the Championship.
It is expected that all the games in the Championship that are not being televised on RTÉ or Sky will be shown on GAAGo, and the hope is that will apply to most of the games in the Allianz Leagues as well.
Speaking to Sean Moran in the Irish Times this morning the GAA’s Marketing and Media Rights Manager Noel Quinn said that “On the intercounty front, we did two rounds of the league and also every championship match that wasn’t televised. That will be the model we’ll follow this year.”
“It will be the biggest broadcast schedule ever put together. Not every match was broadcast previously because people were able to attend but with no possibility of getting inside the venues, it’s great that we’ll have more than 100 games available on broadcast.”
“The GAA has always been forward-thinking when it came to streaming because it’s now the seventh year of GAAGO. The key differentiator between what was originally planned and now is that it was initially set up to serve an overseas market.”
Key Enabler
As a joint venture between the GAA and RTÉ, the idea of GAAGo has prefaced some of the deals that are now being struck around the world. It was a key enabler, with the technology it had created, to allow for the SSE Airtricty League to be streamed in full towards the end of last season and the beginning of this.
In the Onside Sport Industry Monitor, a collaboration with Sport for Business and our members, the view was that we might not see full attendance in grounds until the second half of next year, making the streaming of games of paramount importance to fans, sporting bodies and sponsors for the whole of 2021 at the very least.
“The first task is to get as much TV coverage as possible because that’s the maximum immediate impact and reach. The second key thing is to make sure that there’s as little overlap as can be managed so you can watch Donegal and Tyrone in football before switching over to Limerick versus Tipp in hurling. It is important that streaming services complement the TV schedule.”
Where GAAGo does not have the capacity to cover all games, such as in the lower levels of the Allianz Hurling League, and in the Club Championships when they resume, it is expected that there will be permission granted to individual counties to make their own arrangements in streaming.
Our Sport for Business Conference in May will cover the impact and the potential of streaming, with details to be announced next week.
Sport for Business Partners
