Sky TV Gets Free Marketing
Sky TV have finally gotten some positive marketing, without having to pay a cent. When the mainstream media outlets heard that Spark/TVNZ had secured rights to next year’s Rugby World Cup and other rugby world cup tournaments to New Zealanders, they immediately rushed out and misled the public. Now that customers may have to pay $100 to stream all the 2019 Rugby World Cup matches live (potentially including the All Black matches), that they realise Sky TV’s pricing wasn’t actually too bad.
Reading through comments on articles by the mainstream media have revealed that most people have suddenly realised that Sky TV isn’t such a bad idea. If Simon Moutter’s (Spark Managing Director) unofficial pricing is correct, then $100 to stream all games from the 2019 RWC vs $54.81 per month (at the time of writing: Sky Starter + Sky Sports package) to stream all RWC games plus get access to many other sporting events domestically and internationally, and get other channels from the Sky Starter package, is certainly not what I would call “price-rorting”.
People have also realised that they may be out of luck if they don’t have decent internet, or if they aren’t tech-savvy enough to set up a reliable method of streaming the games on to their big screen TV. This is where Spark will need to think of something wonderful that will mean their customers get uninterrupted streaming of the games. It only takes a poor WiFi setup in their house, before they start blaming Spark for not getting a smooth stream of the games. Which means back to Sky TV if they are die-hard sports fans!
Fun fact: According to MBIE, 87% of New Zealanders will have access to Ultra Fast Broadband by the end of 2022. Meanwhile, Satellite transmission can be received by 100% of New Zealand homes using a satellite dish.
It will be very unlikely that you will be able to watch every single All Blacks match live and free-to-air, and yes, you will have to get decent internet (Spark predict that a vast majority of New Zealanders will have access to UFB and RBI programmes) to stream the rest. Spark have only confirmed that seven matches will be live on free-to-air TV including the opening match and the final match.
Simon Moutter, Spark’s Managing Director, has given a rough ballpark on how much it would cost New Zealanders to stream the entire 2019 Rugby World Cup matches live. $100. The 2019 Rugby World Cup starts on the 20th of September and finishes on the 2nd of November, meaning the Rugby World Cup will span between 44 days. Spark have said that the schedules and official pricing have not been finalised, and that we should expect them to be finalised by early next year.
Now what this says to me is that Spark has gone into this bid with all guns blazing, but did not seem to have an official plan in place yet. Almost as if they had a feeling they would be outbid by Sky TV. In fact, they were so unprepared that they are now giving the 2018 tournaments (which include RWC Sevens and Mens Under-20s) to TVNZ to stream for free. Not to mention, while they have the Lightbox infrastructure to work on, they haven’t quite yet got a live-streaming sports app dedicated to potentially thousands of concurrent users watching. They will have a very limited time to test out this capability, before it is rolled out to thousands of New Zealanders.
