stevegrant

ITV Digital's collapse was a combination of a number of factors: 1. Paying WAY over the odds for the Football League rights - even now, Sky pay about a third of the amount ITV Digital bid back then! 2. Poor quality programming - they tried to do everything on the cheap, including lowering the signal strength to save as much money as possible, but all it did was drive customers away. 3. A massive overestimation of the demand for lower league coverage. Sky have it just about right, IMO, with two CCC games every week plus occasional games from Leagues 1 and 2. ITV Digital tried showing a game from what is now League 2 at least once a week. On occasions, the viewing figures for some of the games didn't even register on the ratings aggregators because they were so poor.

Don't get me wrong, I can see where Setanta are coming from with it, but given that they've already got a pretty dreadful reputation (see thousands upon thousands of complaints regarding the near-impossible feat of cancelling your "contract" - even though the adverts said there was no contract - for evidence) you'd have thought they'd want to keep as many people as possible onside. Also, don't forget that the way the England team are performing at the moment isn't lending itself too well to the task of gaining much support. If fewer people are watching and the unthinkable happens (i.e. we win tonight), nobody's going to get to see any highlights because Setanta over-valued them in the buyers' opinions, and as such people won't have as much of an appreciation of the performance. Had they been able to watch highlights and seen a decent performance, they might be persuaded to subscribe to Setanta so they can watch the whole game in future. Slightly speculative marketing, but given that they've put most of their eggs into this basket this season, it's a strategy I think they've possibly missed the boat on.

And BT Vision. There has always been an arrangement since Sky bought the rights to most of the England away games in recent memory whereby one of the terrestrial broadcasters would pay Sky to use the footage to broadcast a highlights package later that night, and the cost for that was apparently a fairly moderate 6-figure sum (according to the Independent, if I remember rightly). Setanta asking for £1m is either particularly greedy knowing that they've vastly overpaid for the live rights (£5m), or they have simply overestimated the price Sky were charging in the past. Setanta still have exclusive live coverage of the game. No other British broadcaster has that.

Important to note for those who want to go to the Wetherspoons at Shepherds Bush, the Central Line station at Shepherds Bush is closed for refurbishment.

For foreign broadcasts like the Andorra game (I'd expect the Croatia game to be the same, if not worse), they're entirely in the hands of the host broadcaster as to the quality of the picture. I also expect Setanta have tried to get away with as little bandwidth on the digital spectrum as possible, given that it costs them a fortune.

It'll be a couple of years yet, I'd have thought. While they're still apparently about 400k subscribers short of breaking even this year, they've got enough cash coming in from their links to Virgin Media and BT Vision to keep themselves afloat for a while. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them try to wangle their way out of the England contract though, particularly if the Croatia game (quite clearly the biggest game in the group stage) fails to draw the required audiences. Apparently they averaged about 1m viewers (not including pubs) on Saturday, although arguably that low figure was due to the poor quality of opposition, the day of the week (easy enough to watch it down the pub and combine it with a night out) and the pretty-much inevitability of a tedious but comfortable victory. Tonight is quite possibly make-or-break time for Setanta's international football coverage.

Totally agree, although I can't help but think that Bransgrove would prefer a bigger name, perhaps Daniel Vettori who was linked earlier this season...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/counties/hampshire/7606267.stm

Likewise. I'm only a few miles from the Oval and it's been grey and grim all day.

15-man squad for the Stanford Super Series and India ODI series: Pietersen © Anderson Bell Bopara Broad Collingwood Cook Flintoff Harmison Patel Prior (wk) Shah Swann Sidebottom Wright I really can't understand the inclusion of Cook or Sidebottom. Neither of them are effective ODI or Twenty20 players, IMO. Considering Dimi (and probably a few other players I can't think of off the top of my head) has international experience and a proven reputation in those two forms of the game, it's bizarre that those two have been selected. Central contracts produced only one real surprise, and that is that Michael Vaughan HAS been awarded a central contract for the next 12 months. Stuart Broad is added to last year's list. The ECB has also implemented a 12-month "increment" contract for seven of the fringe players, and if they match certain criteria in their occasional appearances they'll also be upgraded to full central contracts. Those seven are Matt Prior, Tim Ambrose, Ravi Bopara, Samit Patel, Owais Shah, Graeme Swann and Luke Wright.

http://www.motors.co.uk

We are working on something along those lines, but it will be tied in with the main site

Yep, and some sort of song praising the BBC, apparently.

Yes, that's a good point. We obviously failed to copy across the RSS feeds from the old forum. I'll try to get those sorted in the next couple of days.

Yep. According to the Telegraph, Setanta are demanding £1m from any British broadcaster who wants to show highlights of the game. This comes after they blew £5m on buying the live rights to this one match. No wonder they've got financial problems!

Sports Centre, 6pm kick-off. Provisional squad: Aaron Austen Sev Roberts Lee Chamberlain Ian Austen Ben Rule Nick Illingsworth Rich Barnes Mike Florit Stu Holloway Andy McGeown Chris Knight Scott Griffin Dan Kerins Steve Grant I've not heard anything from Dan Ridout or Keiron, so presuming they're not going to be there at this stage. I won't be there until half-time due to work, so Scott will be picking the team. Please be there for 5.15pm, or as soon as you possibly can if you can't get there that early.

Went there last time, expecting more of the same (i.e. rubbish performance, defeat and trouble with local police/hit squad), hence not going this time around!

He'd have fitted right in with their defence. Back on topic, we might have a look at the forum banner in a few weeks' time. Baj and I are currently working on getting the main site launched.

Beattie wanted to leave at the first sign of money. Claus and Pahars wanted to stay because they wouldn't have a cat in hell's chance of getting the same money anywhere else. They're all the same.

Bridge isn't even playing Premier League football at the moment. If he'd left Chelsea and gone elsewhere, he'd have been first choice left-back for his new club and in with a much better shout of getting a game for England. Instead, he chose to sign a new 4-year contract on about £50k a week.

That one's probably unworkable in reality. While those times may be the busiest periods (although the article states that 4-5 is the quietest period), they wouldn't be able to employ ticket office staff for two hour slots three times during a day.

We play more qualifiers nowadays. 14 in the last qualifying campaign, so they have to do Saturday/Wednesday double-headers, it's the only way to fit them in around the domestic leagues. Oh, and the England team has generally always been rubbish, it's only the media hype that makes people believe we're any good.

I'd have thought we'll mostly play for a draw, perhaps looking to nick one on the break. For that reason, I expect Walcott to retain his place on the right. Heskey will come in in place of Defoe as he's a good outlet to have when we're on the back foot (which will be most of the time, I suspect). Wes Brown has much better positional play than Glen Johnson, so he'll probably come in at right back. Lampard and Rooney, while clearly deserving of a place on the bench, won't be dropped. James Brown - Ferdinand - Terry - A Cole Walcott - Barry - Lumpoflard - J Cole Rooney - Heskey As for the idea of putting Robert Green in goal, remember what happened the last time we dropped the first choice keeper in favour of a promising younger player before a game against Croatia?

http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/news/?page_id=10558 Basically, the opening hours are changing for a 4-week trial period from 9-5 to 8-4 as between 4 and 5pm is the quietest time of the day for them and they believe it'll be more convenient for people to go there before work rather than try to leave early or go during a lunch break. It starts on Monday 15th September and will run until Friday 10th October, with a decision made near the end of that period to determine whether it will become a permanent arrangement.

To answer a few points that have been raised: Firstly, no disagreement that the forum has been quieter. Whether you term that a good or a bad thing is down to interpretation really. On one hand, there's less content overall, but on the other a lot of the complete and utter crap has also gone. On the main board, which in truth is the only part of the forum I really care about, the actual quality of the content has improved a lot, in my opinion. I certainly wouldn't say that more posts equals a better forum, which is what has been inferred above. The amount of posts has tailed off quite a bit in the last week or so, but that's always happened around international breaks. The number of "active" users has dropped, as has been mentioned. However, I believe a large amount of that is due to the main board not requiring a login to view anymore, as was the case on the old server. The avatar size restriction is purely from a "how does the forum look when people are viewing it" perspective. We initially allowed much bigger avatars, but found that they looked absolutely ridiculous and appeared to "dominate" the page so much that the actual content was often hard to pick out. We may look into allowing slightly bigger avatars again in the future, but they won't be an awful lot bigger for this reason. We may be able to get away with bigger avatars if I can redesign the skin layouts slightly so that all the user data appears down the left with the content to the right. As for the main site, it's taking (a lot) longer than Baj and I were expecting, mainly due to time, unfortunately, and I apologise for the delay and for the upset it's clearly caused many people . I've done a fair amount on it in the past week on my daily commute while Baj has been on holiday, but outside of that, I don't really get much time to work on it. Difficult to put a timescale on a launch, but I'd be disappointed if it wasn't up and running within a couple of weeks.