Virgin Media has confirmed that it will be charging a premium for access to Wednesday night Champions’ League coverage, the rights to which it secured in May.
At that time the channel was still known as TV3 and fully ‘free to air’, but the rebranding and the creation of a new Virgin Sport channel signalled last month suggested time was about to be called on the free access.
RTÉ Sport retained rights to show Tuesday night matches but the ones on Wednesday will now be a little more complex.
Existing Virgin TV customers will have the channel and the coverage added to their package at no additional cost. Virgin Broadband customers will have free access for an introductory period before facing an additional charge of €10 per month. Those who watch from outside the Virgin suite altogether will face an additional charge of €20 per month.
eir Sport show all the Champions’ League games through their partnership with BT Sport, with access free to eir Broadband customers and charged to those wishing to take the eir Sport pack as a separate addition to their existing TV packages.
The Champions’ League and soccer are in the spotlight at present because of the World Cup where Ireland has enjoyed wonderful coverage of every minute free to air on RTÉ over the past month. It has been the same in Britain with BBC and ITV sharing free to air rights and engaging the whole nation in a frenzy of sports viewing.
It is no longer the norm though and for most other countries across Europe, coverage of the World Cup was a mix of free to air and pay TV.
Sky Sports has the exclusive rights to most live coverage of the Premier League season in Britain and, separately, in Ireland for the new season starting in three weeks time which means that there will now be four separate Pay TV contracts required to watch all live televised football from the start of next season.
It is a natural progression that demand and supply have to meet somewhere and sport has proven to be the biggest driver of live television subscription, accelerating the value of media rights across the world.
There has been particular angst and anger at times as first Setanta (then eir) Sports and then Sky Sports came into the GAA and also in Rugby with no games being broadcast live on Free to air TV from the Heineken Cup and then the Champions Cup for over a decade.
Ironically that will change next season with Virgin Sport (under the brand at the time of TV3) having won the ‘free to air’ rights to a limited number of games in that tournament, including the Final for the next four years.
Those games will be shown on Virgin One, the ‘free to air’ element of Virgin Media as the reason for selling those rights was to appease tournament sponsors and create greater and wider reach within the viewing public.
Perhaps though one of the most interesting facets of the Virgin Sport move is any potential impact it may have on the Six Nations Rugby coverage.
The tournament was not included in the reviewed list of designated events that had by law to be provided free to air in the last review in 2017. The IRFU had lobbied the Department of Communication to be excluded from the list due to ongoing negotiation of media rights across Britain and Ireland and in the end, a compromise was agreed where deferred free to air coverage of Irish games in the tournament is required but nothing more.
TV3’s first season coverage of the tournament this spring was a huge success, fired up by Ireland winning the Grand Slam. At the time it was clearly in the free to air camp as TV3.
Now that is no longer the case, and with a revenue-driving separate sports channel on the menu, the picture is not so clear for those who argue that our national obsession with sport means we are entitled to watch what we want when we want.
Sport for Business will be part of a debate on Televised Sport on The Last Word on Today FM this evening, Monday, July 16th.
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Image Credit Brian McEvoy
