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Now, it’s no secret that I don’t have a great relationship with Sky when it comes to their commercial broadcast packages, but I have often written that I have Sky in my home … just not the Sports package. There’s very little on there that I would watch to make it financially viable to me, but now it looks like I’m going to be strong-armed in to signing up to their package if I want to keep on watching my favourite sport.
This might seem okay, but I believe it’s a terrible move on Bernie Ecclestone’s behalf - and this is backed up by the online response to the announcement.
Switch to Twitter this morning and the feeds are full of Formula 1 fans lamenting the fact that they either don’t have Sky at home or, like me, don’t subscribe to the sports channels.
Jenson Button’s management company pondered on Twitter that perhaps all the cars will now be fitted with 3D cameras. A nice idea, but how many homes actually have such television sets?
Not as many as the manufacturers would like us to think, and it’s unlikely to happen anyway - Bernie Ecclestone only managed to get his television company to start broadcasting the sport in High Definition this year... Three Dimensional Formula 1 is unlikely to happen that quickly.
And what about pubs? I get a lovely little crowd in on a Sunday lunch time when races are on, but it’s not enough to make paying Sky £400 a month worthwhile just to show the sport to them. I didn’t get enough in to cover that with the football matches, let alone other sports, which means it would actually be more viable for me to travel to one race a month than show them live to my customers.
I’ve followed Formula One since I was a little boy, from BBC to ITV and back again, and when Sky dallied with a dedicated Formula One channel some years back I subscribed to that, too. It was expensive, and awful.
There is an argument that at least the sport will be being broadcast live somewhere, but when Formula 1 struggles constantly to maintain a relationship with all but its most ardent fans moving it to a subscription channel does nothing to resolve the elitist image the sports teams are trying so hard to eradicate.
Latest Sky Bill
While on the subject of Sky, almost a year after removing the service from my pub I’ve received a bill that states my last bill was £397.15 and that they’d received £463.37 in payment.
This new statement shows that the £66.22 difference in my favour has now been deducted as a Customer Service Debit and I’ll be pleased to know that I now owe them no further money.
I’m still waiting for them to call me back and explain that one...
