Simon Jordan (former owner of Crystal Palace) was a guest of Jim White’s talkSPORT radio show this week and has provided his view on what the Premier League should be doing with regards to broadcasting content. A ‘Netflix of football’ is the suggested idea and it does seem to be a win win for both the consumer and the Premier League brand.
With the Premier League currently on the hunt for a permanent replacement of Richard Scudamore as Chief Executive it seems that more and more candidates are turning it down which begs the question of why? Jordan suggests this could be because the five person recruitment panel is chaired by Chelsea chairman, Bruce Buck, who perhaps has his own agenda supporting the so called ‘big six’.
“The opportunity for The Premier League is exhilarating and exciting for whoever wants to come and do the job.” Jordan said to Jim White. “But they’ve got people like Bruce Buck heading it up”.
“I’ve spoken about the Premier League becoming the ‘Netflix of football’. If you had 100 million subscribers on ‘Premier League TV’ like with Netflix at £8 a month, you’d be bringing in £10bn a year, not £8.7bn every three years like the current deal does.”
“Guess what Netflix does? It doesn’t have any content, it is starting to get its own content but it buys everybody else content. Guess what the Premier League has? It’s own content.”
Currently, to be able to watch Premier League games a consumer has to purchase both Sky Sports and BT Sport and this doesn’t guarantee that they will be able to watch the matches they want to.
To have Sky Sports it will cost you £45 per month for a minimum of an 18 month contract. I know this package comes with a lot of other channels however many of them aren’t of much use to the consumer. BT Sport advertise their sports package from £9 a month but you are still required to have BT Broadband with this so the cheapest you can access their sports channels is at £33.99 per month for a minimum of 18 months again.
Could we see every game of the Premier League live on TV?
A subscription based service that work’s in a similar way to Netflix would be a huge change to the industry but for once it would be the consumer who benefits. £8 a month for fans to be able to watch any Premier League game they wanted to is exactly what they are crying out for. The smaller clubs of the league don’t have the privilege of being on TV every weekend because of the revenue the bigger clubs bring in. As Simon Jordan says, this is also hugely beneficial for clubs individually.
Perhaps Sky and BT will finally pay the price for the constant increase of monthly prices to watch the matches that they ‘carefully’ select. I completely back this idea and hope that there is change sooner rather than later.
See the video of Simon Jordan talking to Jim White on talkSport below.
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