09-04-2023, 07:58 AM
(09-04-2023, 05:43 AM)bkman1990 Wrote: Leinster's tie with Toulouse in the Heineken Champions Cup Semi-Finals will take place on 28th of April.
I haven’t seen that confirmed anywhere yet.
The FAPL…I think they’d be taking a big risk to move to D2C at this point, believe it or not there are many Sky Sports and BT subscribers who have no interest in the PL but all of them are paying for it. For Sky the FAPL has been the rock their entire house is built on and losing it would totally shake their business model to its foundations. I think the better view might be that at least at first they could try a hybrid model, with Sky at least retaining a share of the rights and games being televised by an in-house service in lieu of the secondary rights holder perhaps (or maybe being games that aren’t currently on TV).
On a related note, this weekend is the start of the GAA championships in Ireland and their big experiment of moving to a D2C model began yesterday with the perhaps not heavily anticipated fixture of New York v Leitrim (although there was a shock result in it) but there will be bigger games to come. GAA Go, run by RTE with a 50% stake by the GAA is effectively replacing Sky as secondary rights holder while RTE itself retain their traditional majority share of the rights. This could be a model the FAPL could follow as I say through I’m not sure how it’s going to work out for the GAA.