Has watching footy on TV/online become out of reach for low-income fans?

Honestly, for broke mofos it’s never been cheaper bc there are so many streams and ways to download games that you can just about watch every game for free.

For those willing/able to pay for the content it’s not that bad either. Minimum to watch every game:

Roku express stick= $30 (can use computer instead)
Sling blue (nbcsn)=$25/mo
NBC gold=$50/yr
B/R live(Europa)=$9.99/mo
ESPN+ (League/FA cup)=$4.99/mo

Of course you only have to pay for BR and ESPN while we are in the cups. But in total that’s about $400 for the season if we go to finals. And also, you get the other programming too—champions league, Italian league, bravo, cnn, etc.

This is what I have plus Netflix and amazon and the old over the air antenna. My cable bill was about $100 for TV and the boxes/dvr, sports packages, etc. Despite all the new monetizing I’m still way in the black from what I used to spend, and even with all that some games just weren’t televised—early rounds of the cups.

While I get your grief being in a financial pickle, I think you just got spoiled with NBC the last two seasons. Best bet to save money is to ditch your cable or sat and get the roku with sling or YouTube TV or Fubo.

 

It looks like Gold doesn’t require a TV service subscription. That $150/mo for sat TV service is where you are getting hosed.

My setup...
Internet: $80/mo
Netflix: $11/mo
Hulu: $8/mo
HBO Now: $15/mo
Over the air antenna: $0/mo
Gold: $5/mo

That puts me at $119/mo. I could honestly drop HBO for 9 months of the year and just watch during the winter months to save another $135 annually and have just as good service. Buying a used Roku or Apple TV is under $100 and is necessary for the cord cutting anyway. I cut the cord in early 2013. I’ll never go back to a traditional TV service.

The biggest money saver when I cut the cord was giving fewer ********s about watching sports. It just isn’t worth the time investment when I’d rather be hanging out with my kid or riding my bicycle. I’ll put a game on when we can’t go outside due to weather or whatever, but I just don’t miss it anymore.

 

I don’t think you can watch every match live on NBC gold.

 

Looking at this weekend’s schedule, it appears you would need NBCSN to watch City or CNBC to watch Spuds. Based on that knowledge, they do hose you a bit if your team is on one of the top matches. Yea, that stinks. I’d have no ethical dilemma watching a pirated stream on those days that Arsenal is on NBCSN or CNBC. I’d likely just ride my bike and catch the highlights or replay later. [emoji5]

 

So the $119/mo that @Quentin pays is more than what my 2-TV cable account costs, which is a moderate package plus a Sports Pak... which in years past, used to get me every footy match I'd want to watch on FOX, NBC, ESPN, BeIN.

But that was before ESPN got the rights to EFL/FA cups and put that behind their ESPN+ paywall. Before NBC started shifting a significant % of EPL matches behind their GOLD paywall. Before UCL & UEL got stuck behind Turner's B/R paywall.

Also I believe @crazy150 is right... that $119/mo does not allow you to stream Arsenal league matches that appear on NBCSN or CNBC, which are probably where we're going to appear the vast majority of the time.

And you have to believe we are only at the beginning of this trend towards streaming. There is going to be more fragmentation, more individual streaming packages you have to subscribe to. And watch those $5/mo rates start to creep up, once they capture a critical mass of subscribers.

I have to believe that the costs are going to be higher in the new streaming era than they were in the salad days of cable TV, which aren't that long ago... maybe 2015? And maybe significantly highern at that! I imagine the media companies are salivating at the potential for more revenue streams and bigger profit margins.

Last but not least I haven't even brought up the cumbersome hassle of setting up and managing all of these different subscriptions, not to mention the different streaming GUI's which have different controls and idiosyncrasies and relative quality. Nor the lack of integration between streaming and DVR's which allowed us to retain/watch content forever, dependent only on the size of your disk.

There are too many steps backwards with the current streaming model for me to be happy about it. And cost is only one of those backward steps. Maybe these issues will be resolved at some point, but I wouldn't bet on it. I suspect we will look back on those salad days of cable TV with more fondness than we ever imagined.

FYI, there's been quite a lot written about all of this in recent years, over on the TV forum threads: NBC, ESPN, FOX, etc.

 

p.s. to @BIGHMW, I empathize with your money constraints, but I think sadly you're just gonna have to make a few tough budget decisions if you want to watch your team regularly. For instance, GOLD costs $50/yr. That is probably quite a bit less than one of those new kits you just bought. I know those bring you joy, but maybe you have to just weigh the relative joy of kits vs watching your team? Buy one less kit and sign up for Gold?

p.p.s. I think you should continue to stay away from the pirated streams (i.e. from Reddit) as replacement for NBC Gold. Sure they are free, but the risk, as you already know so well from your Wolfsburg days, is probably not worth the $50/yr savings.

My 2 cents. Good luck to you. And everyone.

 

His $119 includes internet though which I assume you also pay for in addition to your two tv.

I’m not sure I agree with the increase in costs with the streaming. Basically for some people with well negotiated packages, it might increase costs but for most I doubt that.

For example, where I live every cable tv subscriber pays a local sports fee of $6.75 per month and a local channel fee of $8.00 per month. The sports is so you can watch one of the shittiest baseball teams in the league. You cannot opt out of either. Add to that 12$ in taxes and fcc fees. Add to that $10 for HD, $10 for dvr and $10 for additional TVs and your up to $57.

I have sling tv which gets me nbcsn, Fox sports, local nbc, CNN and the wife bravo and hgtv. Total cost $32/mo with dvr and taxes. Also, if PlayStation or google has a better deal/package I can easily switch at any point.

I add to that Netflix $11, nbc gold $5, ESPN+ $5, BR live $10. And I probably won’t need to pay The last two at least 3-4 months of the year. So annual total is about $700 or $59/mo. That just over the $57 for cable without any packages so I won’t even get started on the packages.

Also with the streaming you can vote with your wallet and not just pay for access to the slop buffet. Why should my dad who hates soccer pay for my footy and why should I pay for his shitty Fox News.

Of course the real irony here is NBC is owned by Comcast and Sling is owned by dish. So maybe at some point they do jack up the rates but for now I’m okay with the landscape.

 

@NorthBank My $119 includes $5/mo for Gold premier league pass ($50/season comes out to $4.19/mo to get it all on the same units). I did miss that the games on CNBC or NBCSN would be unavailable, though.

I’m easily saving $500/yr versus my dish cost when I had a basic sports plan that would get me PL matches. I have literally never missed DVR. Different strokes.

 

Reddit soccer streams

 

This is what I used to do, but then I got lucky and my mobile provider bought the rights to the Prem, CL and EL streaming rights and gave it to everyone using them.

So I pay $30 for my phone and get that with it.

But honestly when money is tight I stream. Pay my 89 a month for the net and watch online. Run a cable from my PC to my TV.

 

Nice!! Can't imagine any USA mobile providers doing that.

I also used to do the pirate streams quite a bit in years past... via MyP2P, Livefooty, and then more recently Reddit. BUT those streams are always risky, even if you use decent security software, so I've been weaning myself, and going legit.

I just wish the various providers would recognize that many of us customers are "doing the right thing" and they should sell their products in a fair, reasonable way, in recognition of us doing this, but also to incentivize others to leave behind R/soccerstreams and do legit subscriptions.

Wishful thinking??

 

What do you think is reasonable. Say, nbc or ESPN or Netflix bought the us rights for all English footy plus CL/EL. So you pay one subscription for all your teams games. What would you pay?

Looks like NBC pays about 165m per season, turner pays 65m for CL/EL, and couldn’t find FA/EFL, but say those are another 30m combined.

That’s about 260m per season for coverage of all English teams. Of course if one entity were to collect all these assets, there would probably be bidding wars so call it $300m/season, then they have broadcasting costs and profits so they’d probably need 1B per season revenue.

At 30$, they’d need 3.3 million is households (~2.6%) to pay that? I doubt they’d hit the target. More likely they’d need to charge $40 or more. Is that reasonable?

 

$40/mo seems way too high, just for a few footy competitions.

I guess I feel that no provider should charge more than $3/mo per league/competition. So, if you take Arsenal (or any top English club), they play in 5 competitions, so that would be $15/mo, and that seems about fair.

That's also based on someone who's not a cord-cutter. I still pay good money for my cable package, and for me that plus my DVR is a superior delivery system. YMMV.

As for streaming, we seem to be heading quickly towards fragmentation (NBC vs ESPN vs FOX vs Turner vs ...) and I think it will probably go even further towards micro-fragmentation, where you subscribe for each sport or each competition. NBC has already started to do that with their different subscriptions for EPL, Cycling, etc.

In theory that "a la carte" model could be good for customers... they'd only buy what they want. BUT ONLY if the providers don't get too greedy, and they keep cost per sport/competition relatively low. That's where I come up with the $3/mo idea. But a significant part of me thinks that's a pipe dream.

 

The $40 is what I guess they’d have to charge to do it add free.

Currently, it’s not so bad. If you just want to see the big matches then you just need TNT and NBCSN which is included in most basic cable packages. Add to that 5$/mo for FA/EFL on ESPN+ and that’s not terrible and will get you everything except 5 EPL games, the Europa league, and some CL games.

There may be a savior down the road though. I do wonder if the sponsors will start to bitch about this and structure their deals according to exposure. If total viewer numbers drop bc of paywall then the sponsors (shirt, stadium, etc) are getting hosed. In the premier league the smaller clubs have equal vote, so if they are collectively not doing well in their sponsorship side because distribution is weak then they will push for exposure clauses in the next tv deal.