Imagine this. You are watching an NFL playoff game and there are next to no commercials. In fact, during many ad breaks, you enjoy studio coverage showing highlights and talking about the game. The panel includes a former All-Pro, another player, and a coach, along with a gentleman who has a lovely British accent.
Then, when the game is happening, you get the US feed. Sounds amazing, right? It also sounds like some sort of wonderful dream. Well, it’s not. Believe it or not, this is a reality for those living in the UK or Ireland with a Sky Sports subscription.
It baffles me that the UK NFL viewing experience puts American networks to shame. Look, I understand the reasons why and I’ll get to those in a bit. What bothers me is that American football fans are forced to suffer through an inferior broadcast.
By the way, the opposite has never held true. Soccer fans in America have always been forced to deal with miserable soccer-watching experiences. Tommy Smyth in a Bristol, Connecticut studio calling Champions League games on ESPN2. Awful. Gus Johnson doing soccer play-by-play on Fox. Even worse.
Anyway, NFL fans in the UK have it great. No being forced to sign up for Peacock and then still having to sit through a never-ending stream of adverts. No halftime shows that are 45 seconds of highlights and then more ads. It’s all the football a person could ask for with none of the crappiness–a novel concept, at least in the States.
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So, what’s the UK NFL viewing experience like during the playoffs? The game is the game. It is the same US broadcast you would get back home. The pre-and post-game shows feature the Sky Sports NFL team, which includes former players Ndamukong Suh and Jason Bell, one-time Buffalo Bills coach Phoebe Schecter, and host Neil Reynolds. This is a capable, if slightly uninteresting, group that does know what they are talking about.
During most commercial breaks, this group provides instant analysis which is a refreshing change from being bombarded by ads for Lume and Mando. By the way, these commercials solely exist to make you feel insecure about body odor. When you feel insecure, you are going to use more of their product. And conveniently enough, you can use Lume and Mando all over your body. This leads you to use more, causing you to buy more. All this is not to cover up body odor, mind you, but the insecurity caused by the advert in the first place.
Back to the UK NFL viewing experience. Sky Sports can do this because NFL games air at all hours of the night in the United Kingdom and Ireland. This is not a prime-time slot for advertisers. And while the sport continues to grow in popularity, it’s still not a massive ratings draw.
And it doesn’t need to be since Sky Sports aren’t spending millions of dollars on rights fees. Despite this, the TV provider shows the sport respect as seen by their studio coverage. Sure, you still get some ads, but overall, the viewing experience is much more immersive. It is precisely what you would want when paying a stupid amount of money each month to watch sports.
Make no mistake: Sky is your typical greedy cable/satellite provider with ridiculous packages and all that noise. Yet, the sports division still doesn’t mind investing in a lower-tier property for the department. Meanwhile, ESPN continues to have remote announcers for some game broadcasts despite the fact it’s cheap and awful.
The UK NFL viewing experience putting American networks to shame highlights a huge gap in the market—a massive, missed opportunity in the current reality of cord-cutting. The focus today is to piecemeal these sports broadcasting rights into oblivion. The goal is to have enough sports to make someone subscribe to your service while cutting costs at every turn. It’s a lousy system.
Instead, all these broadcasters should pool their rights in one place and create the ultimate sports streaming platform. Charge a premium price, maybe have a few different tiers and give sports fans in America what they want.
Some will say this would never work but it could and should. When people started cutting the cord, ESPN suffered because it lost carriage fees. These currently amount to $9.42 per cable subscriber. All of those with rights to sports have similar arrangements. There is no reason you couldn’t do something like this but with a streaming platform that pools all these rights together and nothing else.
How the fees would be divided would need to be negotiated, and a price point would have to be established. But there is reason to believe that those with sports rights would make more than existing carriage fees under this system.
But as a fan, if you told me for $79 a month, I could have all the sports I used to get in one place, well, I would have signed up yesterday. More importantly, maybe networks could focus on making the watching experience geared more toward fans. In other words, there should be fewer Nugenix and Friday Plans commercials and more in-game coverage. A boy can dream.
As for the present moment, it seems odd that the UK NFL viewing experience puts American networks to shame. Who would have thought England could do American football better than America? But that’s just the truth of the situation. First, they burned our capitol down. And now they embarrass us when it comes to broadcasting our national sport. Rule Britannia, indeed.
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