I don’t know that I buy Premflix replacing Sky in the UK.
Premier League UK TV rights went for c. £1.7bn per season last time round.
Let’s assume for sake of argument that Premflix costs the same £250 that a nine month Sky sports subscription currently goes for. Viewers get more Premier League games but lose all other parts of the sport offering so it’s as good an assumption as any.
To avoid losing money, Premflix has to be sold to 6.8m of the roughly 20m UK households. Bearing in mind that they’ll probably sell a lot less subscriptions in, say, Scotland, and that they will offer absolutely no non-football non-Premier League content, that’s no mean feat.
They have to sell to even more, or at an even higher price, when you factor in the costs they’ll take on for producing content in-house, working out how to deliver it to people, and pumping out relentless propaganda, all of which will currently be Sky’s problem.
It makes more sense for Sky, because they can use the sport to sell a bunch of other services that people would probably do without, or buy elsewhere, if not for the sport. They also share the cost with Amazon and BT, who each do the same.
Whilst the NFL does have its own streaming service, it also gets more than $10bn a year from domestic TV rights which are absolutely the more important source of revenue, which is further reflected in the massive restrictions placed on domestic streaming to make sure the NFL isn’t harming its TV-company customers.
Obviously above is all speculation and I know nothing, but if I had to guess then I’d say this is actually leverage and diversification more than Premflix contingency planning. Maybe they’re even thinking about what a Super League could do to the competitiveness of the Premier League.
My main concern when seeing this news in the impact in terms of moving kick off times, with longer term worries on the increased Championship share. But, without wanting to be too ScotchEgg about this, part of me also thinks that Sky are very, very, very good at drumming up interest in pretty much whatever they want. They now have £935m reasons to build the EFL brand.
