The first PPV football match in the UK was a football league Division 1 (as was) game on Sky Box Office in the late 90s. It ended up a 0-0 draw and there were no more until the Premier Leage sold a package of PPV games from the 2001 season. NTL bought them (to be available on all platforms) but handed then back when they realised they’d never make their money back and the Premier League got Sky to produce the coverage and sold them to each provider (with ‘ITV Sport Select’ doing their own pre and post match coverage for the one season they existed). Even during the first season you could buy a ‘season ticket’ that worked out at about £1 per game, much cheaper than the £8 per game to buy individually. When the next deal was done Sky bought the rights direct and just made the amount of games they were allowed to (50 I think) PPV. They were never the biggest games, the games on Sky Sports were the first picks, these were the additional games. In effect they became the package Setanta bought.
More or less, yes. There were actually two PPV games from the Football League in 1999 as an experiment - Oxford vs Sunderland and Colchester vs Man City, both of which you'll note featured a big club with a huge fanbase away at a notoriously crap and tiny ground (as both Oxford and Colchester's were in those days). And then after that we had u>direct for a year or so who showed various matches on PPV, including Leeds vs 1860 Munich in a Champions League qualifier and, famously, Finland vs England in October 2000. When I bought my first DVD player it came with a DVD of England's 2002 World Cup qualifying campaign, including that match with u>direct graphics. More people probably saw it on that DVD than on u>direct.
You're right about the Premier League PPVs, in 2001-04 they were deliberately sold as a PPV package, and as you say NTL originally bought them but gave them up. I remember the story was that they were going to contract the production to BBC Sport, however that would have worked. In 2004 I recall they had a gold, silver and bronze package, of decreasing quality, and the bronze package "could be" PPV.
The 2001-04 rights were originally awarded to NTL exclusively but then they had to bail and Sky picked it up. However as NTL customers we got every game on Premiership Plus for £10 per season during this time. When Sky got the rights for the 2004-07 seasons the price on NTL went up to £50 per season.
Didn’t know anyone who bought the games individually during this time. Closest thing we have is the NOW TV Day pass for Sky Sports, and I know people who do buy passes from time to time, I think this more successful because it’s has something more than just one game.
I remember Mark Radcliffe on Radio 1 circa 2003 talking about how long it took for him to buy a Man City PPV match the previous night. As you say, most people just bought the season ticket and were in essence "subscribing" to PremPlus like they would Sky Sports.
I used to find PremPlus quite exciting, especially on NTL as there was always the excitement that they might forget to switch it on. And we had the big countdown clock before it, and I came to know Marcus Buckland's spiel about the pictures being encrypted shortly and how you could puchase every match off by heart.
As you say, Sky produced the coverage but in the first season ITV did their own pre- and post-match coverage - which NTL took too, reverting to the Sky presentation from season two. I first got it in 2004, when it was entirely Sky-produced everywhere, and as I say Sky themselves owned the rights outright, but the links between the two were interesting. In 2004-05, they used the same graphics as Sky (albeit a different colour scheme) but Alan Parry did more or less all of them as official PremPlus commentator. But then from 2005-07, Sky commentators shuffled between Sky Sports and PremPlus every week, but the graphics were completely different.