With you on that.
Tuesday evening anno seems to indicate a Sky/BT carve up.
If it was a streaming site like Twitter or Amazon Prime, then Id take a shot at the announcement being made on Tuesday morning - so the traders on Wall Street/Nasdaq could reflect the news with the shares with early trading starting at 9am EDT/1pm GMT
More apparent nonsense from the Mail tonight, suggesting that these unsold matches could be merged with the near live rights to maximise value. Hence possibly flogging all 40 to Sky which would mean they would go over quota. If this were to happen then all hell would break loose and all sorts of legal action would result. I can see Ofcom being involved immediately too.
I don't take this story seriously at all and still believe that a conclusion on the 40 remaining live matches will be announced on Tuesday.
As for the near live content offer, if anyone other than Sky gets these I'd eat a metaphoric hat. They're crucial to their schedules, moreso than some of their live rights.
And break the Premier Leagues own rules. No one broacasters can win more than 5 of the 7 available packages.
You give Sky the remaining two, and as you say, 'best new friends' or not, BT would be hammering on the door of the high court, first thing Wednesday morning.
The only way it could work, is if they are rolled into existing packages already won, Sky get the majority, and somehow BT end up with, say 8 games to take them back up to 40 per season, with a very reduced fee to pay.
Is there any data publically available on how many subscriber to both Sky and BT and how many subscribe to one but not the other.
I just wonder how much exclusivity of a slot is worth to either broadcaster - i.e. with the midweek/Bank Holiday matches would either really be hurt that much should games be on Sky and BT at the same time? Considering Sky always schedule the EFL against BT games I'd have thought the impact on them would be minimal, and Sky wouldn't be too worried about BT either. Of course 1st choice in the slot is crucial, but I think having your rival responsible for producing up to half the games in the pacakge probably outweighs the diminishing returns of showing all the games yourself.
Report that the last two packages are to be resolved on Tuesday. Expect announcement early evening as usual.
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No announcement, so the report was incorrect then, we move on.
Not necessary, it could be there hoped to resolve the problems today but further issues resulted in the package not been given out. So we should be asking what might have caused this.