My Shout - John Grogan MP
Patriotic pubs catch World Cup fever was the headline in York's local newspaper last weekend. Throughout the country the Union flags are going up and the big screens are being installed.
Last Saturday's FA Cup Final certainly whetted the appetite for the main event that's yet to come, with more than 10 million viewers tuned in to BBC1 by the time Steven Gerrard scored his last-minute equaliser and 11 million watching the penalty shoot-out.
It is always worth remembering that the FA Cup and the World Cup are part of the crown jewels of sport, which must by law be made available to everybody on free-to-air television. As a result pubs up and down the land can be a real focus of community life over the coming weeks for nothing more than the price of a TV licence fee. Long may it remain so.
Moreover, viewing figures for Sky TV's coverage of the First Test against Sri Lanka were only 200,000, compared with the 700,000 gained by Channel Four last year for the equivalent test match against Bangladesh.
Cricket may well live to rue the day that it became the only major sport to sell all live coverage of its game to subscription television.
The same youngsters
who last year were in the park pretending to be Freddie Flintoff will this year be inspired by Steven Gerrard and his England team-mates.
Most pubs do not have the cashflow to justify buying Sky Sports. Sky revolutionised television sport for the good in the 1990s in the same way that BBC Grandstand did in the 1960s. Monday-night football brought pubs a whole new market on a dead night at the beginning of the week.
Time has now moved on though, and Sky's dominant position in the broadcast of sport has become an increasingly-important issue for the pub sector. The competition authorities should carefully scrutinise the latest Premier League deal as it relates to pubs. Price increases of up to 50% for pubs are being rumoured.
Sky, which won four of the six packages, has done a deal with Setanta Sports, which won the other two packages, to make a joint offering to pubs. It seems to me worth testing whether this is unfair collusion. Setanta is trying to distribute its matches through other platforms for people watching in their homes.
They may well do a deal, for example, with Top-up TV, which is a subscription service available through a Freeview box. If they come to such an arrangement why should a pub not be able to ring up Top-up TV and get the Setanta Sports matches (many of which are on a Monday night)?
Certainly there would be a premium for commercial premises, but the level of that premium should not be set by collusion but by competition. Is not Rupert Murdoch himself meant to be one of the great advocates of the benefit of competitive markets?
