I currently pay for Sky Sports via NowTV. I got a deal through work for it at £25/m and that’s an acceptable price for me cos I watch as much F1 coverage as I can, and as much of the darts as I can.
I started paying for BT Sport earlier in the year to watch the champions league knockouts but jumped ship when I realised I wasn’t justifying the expense by watching enough.
What do you watch/would you watch if you had access?
football
cricket
rugby union
rugby league
hockey
ice hockey
gaelic football
american football
basketball
athletics
boxing
MMA
cycling
golf
tennis
F1
Moto GP
other car racing
other motorbike racing
swimming
horse racing
darts
snooker
bowls
badminton
netball
table tennis
squash
skiing
other
0voters
What do you pay for?
Sky Sports via tv
Sky Sports via NowTV streaming
BT Sport via tv
BT Sport via streaming
DAZN
single pay-per-view events (frequently)
single pay-per-view events (now and then)
Other (let us know what)
Only watch free to air sports
Don’t even have a tv license
0voters
illegal streaming? anonymous poll
exclusively
frequently
only if official coverage not provided/isn’t working
never
0voters
What would you prefer?
1 provider, build your own package of what you wanna watch
Multiple providers competing (so multiple companies showing the same event/s
What we have now, multiple providers bidding then holding a monopoly over what they paid for
0voters
what price would you think fair for all-you-can-watch sport per month if everything you’d ever want to watch was included?
do regularly watch football, tennis, athletics and sometimes snooker.
that’s it really. would definitely dip into cricket, basketball and hockey if they were free to air
much as i love football, i hate how it’s so big that it looms over every other sport. variety is good imo
The only sport I’m really fussed about watching is American football.
The NFL make is relatively simple to watch in the UK with an NFL Gamepass subscription, it’s about £120 for the year and means you can essentially watch all but two games a week live (the two games that are shown on Sky) and everything in catchup, as well as a huge archive, live NFL Network channel, NFL Films productions etc.
I wouldn’t begrudge it except it’s just shit and badly done, picture quality is inconsistent, it always seems to fall over at key moments like the first game of the season etc. Ultimately I could probably access the same stuff via hooky streams, but I pay for the convenience and the catch up is useful (so I can watch the Sunday night games on Monday morning etc).
There is free to air cricket on at the moment (men’s and women’s) for the first time in years. I’ve only caught bits of it but it looks pretty fun. The on screen graphics make it look like a ps2 game
One of my main problems with football on TV at the minute is the presenters. I hate Robbie Savage, Steve McManaman, Danny Murphy, Alan Shearer and a host of others. Most of all I cannot abide Martin Tyler for any length of time. I will go as far as to watch with foreign commentary or on mute if I can’t find an alternative. (Can’t really comment on Souness and the like because Tyler keeps me away from their coverage)
If they freshened up their pundits and commentators and showed the 3pm games then I’d definitely pay.
Tbh, the quality and reliability of illegal streaming in recent years has been so good in recent years that the price would have to be very good for me to go back to paying for it.
I watch some Tennis on Amazon Prime but that’s just a nice addition and don’t have Prime solely for that.
Don’t pay for any other subscriptions but would be tempted if there was a build your own package type deal which was fairly priced.
I used to be a huge football fan and would watch pretty much every live Premier League game on Sky when I was growing up at home, but can’t justify the price now so rarely watch any games other than the finals that might be shown BBC1/ITV.
Mentioned in the Euros threads but does kind of baffle me how difficult and expensive it is to just watch football (soccer), there is about zero prospect of me becoming a fan of club football because I’m never going to pre-emptively pay for access to follow a team. And I could go see my new local club but they’re League One, would their away matches be televised at all? Are they shown online?
there’s a service called ifollow that provides lower league coverage at a tenner a game, they’ve stopped showing 3pm saturday games again now though (but you can still watch them from overseas or using a VPN)
Think £20 for everything wouldn’t pay more than that. But at the sametime I don’t feel morally obliged to give most of these sports any money at all and if you can find freebies why not.
oh dear you’re forgetting something important here
multiple providers for the same things would mean you could avoid the presenters and pundits you hate the most - so the providers could actually compete on quality, like they say capitalism is for
oops, I have Eurosport streaming but forgot to include it!
£40 for a year and there’s shitloads of stuff available that interests me (lots of snooker), really good deal imo
Yeah but they have multiple ones now and my choices are Steve McManaman and Robbie Savage vs Martin Tyler and you have to pay twice to have access to all the games offered
Makes some sense, but as a potential, casual fan it’s also incredibly off-putting. I could maybe go to a few live games a season, but the rest of the time I’m meant to listen on radio? Follow tweet updates? Read a match report in a paper the day after? It’s pretty Victorian, isn’t it.
