I had every confidence that the challenge from these two regarding the use of foreign satellite cards purchased from a provider from within the EU was always going to fail and certainly the courts have now agreed.
Sky of course are desperate to maintain their income from UK pubs,as this goes a long way in recovering the massive payment, rumoured to be in excess of £1 billion for the live broadcast rights to premier league games in England. Sky had a great opportunity to work with UK pub industry. However the continual massive annual increases forced a number of businesses to cancel Sky and potentially look elsewhere for a provider.
As an aside, it is galling that over 80% of the income Premier League clubs receive from Sky is spent on players highly inflated salaries, so just remember that without all your contributions, then Terry, Tevez and friends would only be on £150,000 per week and how could they possibly manage on that I ask you?
On a more serious note, the victory by Karen surely opens the door for other pubs to consider purchasing a card from a EU provider and showing live football on a Saturday afternoon at 3pm, certainly until the next round of broadcasting rights are negotiated in the next couple of years.
When Sky was initially available in pubs, accepting in the early days at a reasonable rate, customers flocked to pubs on a Monday and often a Sunday afternoon for live football. Sky read this as an opportunity to ratchet the costs, beyond economical reason and I believe these exorbitant costs have driven pubs to the foreign providers. However, these big sessions have all but disappeared, as customers choose to stay at home ands pubs are then hit by the ‘double whammy’ of high costs and less customers!
It was great therefore to join a few mates at the Pelican, Chew Magna, near Bristol last Saturday to watch England v France. The broadcast on ITV was of course free, pub was packed and we all ate an excellent breakfast, which as it turned out was the only highlight (unless you are Welsh) of the morning!
Finally, I was a guest last Friday evening at the Help for Heroes Awards evening, when 50 people were recognised for their outstanding support of the charity. One of these was a musician Ian Campbell who played a gig in a different pub, all unpaid up & down the UK for 366 consecutive nights and collected over £143k. He commented how pubs, both licensees and customers, really understood the need to help our injured men & women. It’s a travesty that successive governments have failed to do so as well.
David Elliott is chairman of Hinton Pub Company