Channel bundles detract from Sky’s sporting bedrock

Sky TV has not been all bad.

All right, its subscriptions have cost an arm and half a leg, but we have access to more instant live sport than ever thanks to the wonders of Optus satellites.

During the recent Winter Olympics, there were up to eight channels screening the frigid Games, even if half of them seemed tuned to that slip-sliding curling stuff and teenagers doing flips in half pipes.

Now, with the looming threat of giants such as Amazon, Sky is apparently reducing its subscriptions and rearranging its bundles.

Any drop in rates will be popular, but everyone seems to object to having to buy bundles, which include junk channels or the comedy Trump show that is the American Fox News. While sport is its bedrock, not until Sky finds a way to sell channels individually will it halt its subscriber drain.

It was obvious Sky was feeling the pinch when it recently closed the Palmerston North office to the public.

Sky does go to great lengths to dispatch those hulking great outside broadcast trucks all over the country to every NPC rugby and All Blacks match and all of the Black Caps cricket. With all the staff involved, it must be hugely expensive.

Then there’s all the big stuff from overseas that bounces on to my dish, every NRL match, golf, netball, the tennis majors... Wunderbar.

They did lose the American golf for a year or so to a private outfit, but, fortunately, most golf tragics, such as me, encouraged everyone to boycott that one and anyway, the picture quality varied. So, thankfully, Sky got it back.

They also lost the English Premier League the same way and when they got it back it has become pay up or miss out on Bein Sports.

TVNZ has the rights to the upcoming Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, but will be showing them on only three channels.

That may be enough with the diminishing interest in the Games and Sky won’t be too bothered.

I have never begrudged paying a few extra dollars for My Sky, which allows us to pause, rewind or record programmes.

Foxtel has the same system in Australia, even if Fox seems to screen twice as many channels.

When Sky kicked off outside the Auckland area in 1990, there were just three channels. Four years later, most provinces came into the loop and we would fly up to the new headquarters at Mt Wellington where the company founder Craig Heatley also housed his helicopter. Chief exec, American John Fellet, was there even then.

Pay television was new to New Zealand. It was exciting and compared with today’s massive coverage, sport had been almost in a vacuum, TV wise.

There was no satellite, not until 1998. Until then, it was analogue UHF with a UHF aerial, many of which are still seen on roofs, and a decoder unscrambled the picture, foul weather and rain fade permitting.

We were initially told Sky would be ad-free and all of the channels would be at no extra cost.

Well, that soon changed once Sky became mainstream. The adverts were probably inevitable and only companies with a death wish would turn away advertising cash.

But charging extra for such channels as the Rugby Channel was a bit rich.

Many rugby types have continued to shun it on principle and don’t believe we are missing much.

Only on Monday, Sky broadcast the Academy Awards on one of the movie channels that so many have ditched with the arrival of Netflix.

There was also the unseemly fuss when Sky snaffled the media rights to the Rio Olympics, which led to the affronted print media not sending anyone to Brazil to cover them.

Sky pays royalties for its big sport and its commentators are discouraged from being too critical, but sport will always be Sky’s lifeblood.

Cricket at all costs

Making the transition from press box to pressing my rear upon normal punters’ seats has been interesting.

For instance, at the cricket in Wellington on Saturday, the stadium was only one-third full. After motoring to Waikanae, we paid $48 for our cricket tickets, although Winston Peters saw us right on the Metlink train to and fro.

On the way back, with 750 humans on board eight carriages, the Metlink woman came on and apologised for the service being seven minutes late – great PR.

Had they charged $28 for the cricket, I wondered whether they might have doubled the crowd? Not that price bothered many fans who had bought their Tui shirts for $30 and who made countless trips to their fading yellow seats with plastic packs of four cups of tap beer at $8.50 a slurp and servings of fried fodder.

A gate guardian pounced when she spotted my bottle of water and tipped it into a rubbish bin in case it had been laced with the demon drink.

When that happens to a friend of mine, he always insists on slugging the water in front of the sentry, but then he also claims to be a 103-year-old on his census form and an adherent of the Grasscutters and Gorse-grubbers religion.