Somewhere at home, perhaps under a sofa cushion, there is always a misplaced DVD from the three-box set of the 2005 Ashes series. That is what happens when cricket-mad small children are around.
Now that was a cricket series that gripped the nation and clearly still has its devotees. Back then, when it was shown on Channel 4, audiences peaked at eight million for what was arguably the most exciting Test series for a generation.
Since then, England have been in action playing the five-day game several times — including a 5-0 away drubbing to some Antipodean nation that nobody with English blood cares to remember. Aficionados apart, nobody really remembered much about any of those games until the Ashes came round again last summer.
Thousands came to places such as Regent’s Park to watch England on the big screen as they clinched a 2-1 series victory. The 2009 series may not have generated quite the same excitement as 2005, not least because the matches were simply not as good, but it is a home Ashes series, and only a home Ashes series, that interests the nation. Or, to put it another way, only the most enthusiastic eight-year-old would own a DVD of a series in India, South Africa or Pakistan.
Today, David Davies will make his recommendations on whether changes should be made to the list of sporting events that have to be broadcast on free to air television. He might say the Winter Olympics could be on pay television, which would hardly be a great loss for a country that has little idea what to do on a wintry day other than take the day off work and throw snowballs. And he might also say that a home Ashes series will have to be shown on free to air television — which would certainly please some cricket fans who don’t want to pay a subscription.
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That’s fine as far as it goes but the financial impact on cricket will be significant. Today, this is a sport whose governing body, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), generates just over 50 per cent of its income from TV rights. The last set of figures show that of the ECB’s income of £94 million, £54 million of it came from BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster 39.1 per cent owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times. Five, which shows the test highlights, pays only £1 million a year of that total.
The next four-year deal, again with Sky, runs from 2010 to 2013, and is expected to see television income lift further to £66 million a year. Sky can afford to outbid rivals, because it has deeper pockets than Channel 4, which is struggling in the teeth of the advertising downturn, and the BBC, which prefers to spend its sports budget on Six Nations Rugby and Formula 1.
Taking the Ashes on to free to air only, though, means that the ECB will have to sell its rights to those cash-conscious terrestrial broadcasters. ITV is never, ever going to bid. Cash-strapped Channel 4 only held the rights in the first part of the decade as part of a wider brand-building exercise. It never made much money from the sport. And the BBC, which many might feel is the natural home for Test cricket, is curiously ambivalent to a sport that eats up the schedule and generates a relatively small number of viewers except in those handful of nailbiting moments. And the politics of the licence fee mean that the BBC is, to a degree, cash-constrained in any bid it could make. When the BBC last held the rights, back in the late 1990s, allbeit in a different broadcasting era, it paid about £18 million a year.
At the same time, given the interest in the Ashes in isolation, the value of the remaining Test, one-day and Twenty20 rights will drop sharply. It is a reasonable guess that the one summer series every four years accounts for about half, perhaps even more, of the value of the total broadcast rights sold by the ECB. The result would be that the sport would struggle to beat the £50 million in televison income generated in the last season where Channel 4 held the rights.
There is an argument that it should not be all about money — or, as they say in sports broadcasting, “reach” should be more important than “revenue maximisation”. It is a perfectly reasonable choice that can be undertaken by any sports rights holder, with Formula 1 prospering on free to air, and Champions League football managing well with a free/pay hybrid approach that gives ITV1 some badly needed male viewers during the week. Cricket, though, has chosen something different — and if it were forced to sell the Ashes only to a free to air broadcaster, it would suffer a drop in income resulting in less cash to spread around the game. This could in turn mean less coaching and other resources for youngsters.
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It is official: the recession is over. That is the clear message from the surging prices for X Factor adverts, which goes to show that escapism can eventually prompt economic recovery. With television bookings rebounding in January, the market looks set for a modest bounceback next year — far better than the small drop that pessimists were predicting. We may be far from the good old days of 2007, but in this industry, the shape of the recovery is more U than L. Time to start investing for the future.