Sadly I think that's a big part of it. And with the exception of Abdo, they really wanna go with (North) American "talent" on their show. I said it elsewhere but B/R has reached a new low in terms of the quality of UCL coverage over the years. I hope there is some improvement in their year 2 when my team is back in that tournament.
With the group stage over now and Turner managing to get actively worse, we can definitively say this has been a fail for both the fans and uefa for selling their rights to this gimmick. At least we have the Spanish channels, but that has it's issues as well.
Devil's advocate: ratings are up and most viewers don't care at all, or certainly not as much as those of us in this forum. Also we traded Stone/Lalas/Wynalda/etc for Abdo/Holden/Nash/etc. Not exactly lopsided Also some more, TNT's picture quality is about as good as it gets on cable/sat.
The only issue with Univision is the fact that there’s no Univision Deportes app for connected devices and the overflow games aren’t on Univision Now. I guess also the fact that you have to sit through 30-60 seconds of commercials when you switch games. That won’t be an issue anymore in champions league because all the remaining games will be on their linear channels. I guess it will remain an issue in Europa league, but will be less and less of an issue as the number of games whistles down.
Devil's advocate x2: Although it started out as a spoiler-laden dumpster fire, B/R Live (at least on Roku & Amazon Fire, where I use it) has turned into a decently reliable streaming service and I'm able to watch all of the UCL and Europa League on it with the world feed announcers (I haven't gotten around to this last matchday where I heard about Nash/Holden so I don't know if the streams of those matches feature them as well). And the $10/month I'm paying for it is half the price I paid last year for Fox Soccer Match Pass. Elsewhere, I really don't care about pre-game/half-time shows as I never watch them; I'd rather spend that time watching actual matches.
Watching Rapid Wien-Rangers and Besiktas-Malmo on Univision Deportes online with the crowd noise turned up and without commentary is a blissful experience.
Without spoiling, a dramatic Celtic-Salzburg match has been funny to watch with only the crowd giving clues as to what's going on.
It's not just the "talent" that warrants comparison. The quantity and quality of the highlights they have in their post match show is bare minimum. And at least Fox augmented their coverage by picking up the excellent international feed nightly highlights shows (on TV). Turner has too much hubris or too little budget to do likewise?
The intl feed highlights show is in the B/R subscription :-| https://live.bleacherreport.com/soccer/soccer-tournament/events/ucl-highlight-show-1212/52295
The UEFA Champions League and Europa League Draws on Monday were offered for free on BRLive, but those tuning in got a "Your event is about to begin' screen and nothing else on both counts. Luckily I was aware that one could watch both shows on uefa.com, which I did, with Univision Deportes televising both as a backup.
UDEP kept to their schedule, literally. Both draws had 30 minute windows and while the Champions League was broadcast in full, at around 26 minutes past the hour the (longer) Europa League draw broadcast was suddenly cut off mid-draw for commercials. At 30 minutes past the hour some other program came on and I was left hanging on the outcome of the rest of the draw.
1970's tech: As of February 2018, Voyager is roughly 141 astronomical units (sun-Earth distances) from Earth. That's roughly 13.2 billion miles, or 21.2 billion kilometers. You can look at its current distance on this NASA website.Feb 28, 2018 Still sending signals to earth, yet todays tech the internet is full of problems, all I can do is scratch my head (???)
https://worldsoccertalk.com/2019/02...-fewer-choices-champions-league-round-16-tnt/ says TNT is sticking to their word of only showing one game on TV at a time. They have decided this for February 12 and 13: February 12: Manchester United vs. Paris Saint-Germain on TNT, AS Roma vs. Porto on B/R February 13: Tottenham vs. Borussia Dortmund on TNT, Ajax vs. Real Madrid on B/R They have not announced February 19 and 20 yet. The article says that considering TNT chose Tottenham over Real Madrid, they could choose Schalke 04 vs. Manchester City on February 20 and make you need B/R to watch Atletico Madrid vs. Juventus. Those two are both among the top five in the UEFA club coefficients. On February 19, both games have big clubs, as there is Liverpool vs. Bayern Munich and Lyon vs. Barcelona. If TNT shows every game with an English club, Bayern Munich will be the only one of the top five in the club coefficients to be on TNT. Spain is by far the top league in the country coefficients. Games not on TNT could be televised in Spanish.
Respectfully, Tottenham-Dortmund is a more interesting game than Ajax-Real Madrid so nothing wrong with that choice. However, choosing Schalke-Man city over Atletico-Juve would be beyond dumb.
I disagree slightly. Ajax is a fun young team to watch and will make things very interesting against Real.
Turner would lose a lot of Real Madrid audience to Univision anyway so this is probably a smart move. And it's not really so much about players and potential match closeness as it is about clubs that do well with the English speaking American audience. Premier League > all in that regard.