stevegrant

Well they've made a bit of a mess of that one then!

That did surprise me, given the apparent city-wide disgust at the news of a potential closure. Either a sign that, actually, not as many people give a toss as originally perceived (although I'd have thought as many Ford employees as possible would have tried to attend?) or there's a defeatist attitude going around that no matter what they do it'll close anyway.

Further to this... Setanta eventually allowed ITV to show a highlights package last night in exchange for a payment of just £100,000 - 10% of what they were originally demanding. Also, they're considering offering the highlights of the Belarus game next month for free to either the BBC or ITV because of the sheer weight of negative publicity they've received off the back of their perceived greediness. Oops.

If anyone has booked a complete package through XL, they're covered under ATOL. However, if anyone's booked individual components of their holiday with XL, basically you're screwed. Which is complete nonsense, really, isn't it...

It's usually full in both directions on my commute, but the air conditioning is pretty good on SWT trains these days so it's rarely stuffy at all. It's not cheap (just under £400 per month) but I'd rather sit on a train for an hour and a half or so and not have to concentrate on anything than sit in my car on the M3/M25 probably for even longer and be obliged to concentrate for the entire journey.

Let the train take the strain

Not according to the Tube route planner. 33 minutes from Waterloo to Shepherds Bush (H&C) via Baker Street 23 minutes from Waterloo to White City (next stop on the Central line from SB) via Bond Street

Something I mentioned on the away travel forum: http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=1389

He probably stops just short of actually saying that, although he's always banged on about how he gave Joe Cole, Michael Carrick, Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand their debuts at West Ham as some sort of sign that he a) cares about young players and b) developed their talent before unleashing them on the unsuspecting Premier League, when in actual fact they were nurtured by the West Ham academy and selected for the first team because they were far better than anyone else Redknapp had at his disposal. If any other manager had been West Ham manager at the time, they'd have done exactly the same thing. Redknapp was just lucky that he was in the hotseat at the time.

Yes, although it'll still be restricted to those who can actually receive Setanta, i.e. Sky Digital, Virgin Media and BT Vision subscribers as well as most of those with a Freeview box. Arguably, they would get a better return by selling highlights to a terrestrial broadcaster as then a wider audience get to watch them, and then there's more potential subscribers...

There isn't really anything anyone in this country can do about the game being broadcast live on Setanta, because the broadcasters deal directly with the home team's FA when negotiating live rights. It is when it comes to the highlights package where the other broadcasters then have to negotiate with whoever's showing the game live. This is where Setanta have probably got it wrong. The 1.55m viewing figure isn't too bad considering their fairly low subscriber numbers, but for only 290,000 to watch highlights that were regularly watched by 2.5m in the past, that's pretty terrible.

Not much use "on the move", though, I'd have thought Mario Kart is probably the main example I can think of, if I remember rightly there are a few crossword/Sudoku-type puzzle games available as well.

I read it (and the near-identical one that was on the BBC website earlier this morning), and while the sentiment is all well and good - and I appreciate that he was on the fans' side of the fence in the past - it's all a bit late now and fairly irrelevant. Football at the highest club level will implode within 10 years, in my opinion. The economic climate is hitting your average Sky customer pretty hard at the moment (and is likely to continue for a fair amount of time yet), and one of the first things people will cut back on is Sky subscriptions. It's nearly £50 a month these days, money that could probably feed a family for a week. Without the subscriber levels, Sky will struggle to pull in the advertising revenue, and as a result won't be in a position to offer anywhere near the level of investment into Premier League football when the next contract is up for renewal. It's already obvious that Setanta have paid way over the odds (much like ITV Digital did, but without the likelihood of them going bust due to their operations in other countries) for their share and won't make that mistake twice. When the owners realise that there's not as much money to be milked from the English football fan anymore, they'll soon be walking away, leaving someone else to clear up the mess and to pay the £150k a week wages.

Not at all predictable, was it?

Nothing like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted... These are issues supporters groups, trusts and other organisations have been raising with both football authorities and government for years. Nobody cared enough then, because it wasn't in their interests to care, and I don't really see how anything's changed since then.

No idea what Sky used to get for England away games, to be honest. They have a much larger subscriber base, though, so it stands to reason that their viewing figures for comparitive games would be higher. However, I *think* viewing figures may be calculated based upon the number of people in a household, rather than simply the number of actual subscribers viewing. So while Setanta averaged just over 700k (see Mail comment/quote above), it's highly likely that that figure is not 700k subscribers, but may even be only half that amount taking into account the average number of people in subscribers' households.

Not an awful lot of chance of bowling them out twice at the Oval in two days, to be honest, particularly with the weather forecast predicting more rain and bad light. From the perspective of "must not lose", it makes total sense to keep batting as it reduces the amount of time Surrey have to win the game. They have to win to stand much chance of staying up, whereas we only really need to avoid defeat. There's no chance of a result, so the maximum number of points we're playing for is 12 (5 batting points which we've already got, up to 3 bowling points for taking 9 or 10 wickets in the first 130 overs of the first innings, and 4 points for the draw). That would put us on 150. A handful of points in the final game against Nottinghamshire should see us safe.

Why the **** couldn't England play like that when I went to Croatia away?!

This is the Oval, remember...

Tremlett gone first ball. Surprised we haven't declared now, given that Surrey need 9 wickets to get 3 bowling points, and we've already got the maximum batting points.

Dawson's best score is 38?! Are you sure?

Yeah, they've got a mass broadcast deal with both Virgin Media and BT Vision. No idea of the figures involved, but I think an Independent article earlier in the week mentioned figures of about 2m between the two of them, but yes, it'll definitely be less than 12.99 per month.

The Monopolies Commission and the Competition Commission at the EU ruled that Sky couldn't bid for all of the available live TV packages because it denied the opportunity for other broadcasters to enter the market. The idea of "competition" in the marketplace is that it improves the deal for the consumer. Before the current TV deal, you got a load of games with Sky Sports, and if you wanted, you could pay £50 for the Prem Plus season ticket (or less if you got in early like most people), and that would be it for the season. Under the current TV deal, you get a load of games with Sky Sports, but now if you want the other games, you have to pay £12.99 per month (£155.88). So despite competition increasing, it's had the opposite to the desired effect and actually INCREASED the cost to the consumer.

I've not received anything from them in the post since I signed up, with the exception of the waste-of-paper-and-ink welcome pack.

But if the UK arm of Setanta is losing too much money, I'd imagine they'd just cut the UK bit adrift or cancel its contracts here. They're looking at losing at least £50m this year due to low subscriber numbers. I don't claim to know how big the company is worldwide, but I'd suspect any company's directors would want to get rid of a part of their company that was expected to be profit-making but ended up making that sort of a loss. If they go off the air in this country, as far as the UK population is concerned they've disappeared. I pay £12.99 a month (which went up from £9.99 a month about two months ago without them even telling me - technically illegal, as far as I'm aware) and don't feel as if I'm getting anywhere near value for money. While I generally enjoy their football coverage because it doesn't have arse-licking presenters and pundits, the actual picture quality of the broadcasts is terrible. Given that I'm paying £47 for the full package on Sky (although I really should cancel the Sky Movies part as I hardly ever use it), an extra £13 a month is just too much for the quality of the product they're offering.