Newcastle<\/a> cable station because the BBC or ITV won’t be able to afford the rights to the game,” he said.<\/p>\n“The cable operator will have paid a fortune for it, but he knows he’ll get the money back from subscription.<\/p>\n
“It’s probably going to be done on pay-per-view, so you’ll put a card and a number on your telephone, tap it in, five quid docked from your account, the game pops up.”<\/p>\n
More three decades on, subscription-funded broadcasters continue to be the gatekeepers of top-flight English football.<\/p>\n
In 2023, the Premier League agreed a record four-year \u00a36.7bn domestic television deal for Sky and TNT to show up to 270 live games a season from 2025-26.<\/p>\n
Reflecting on his original predictions, Duncanson said it “wasn’t rocket science” to see where things were going “if you followed the money”.<\/p>\n
“Sky had changed the game by spending so much money on rights because it established them as a major satellite power, and they continue to this day,” he said.<\/p>\n
Casting his eye towards the future, Duncanson sees the nature of subscription viewing changing.<\/p>\n
“We’re all going to learn a new acronym: DTC – direct-to-customer,” he said.<\/p>\n
“There is a bit of a push-back now with subscription prices rising, from football fans who say, ‘Why do I have to pay so much money? I don’t want to watch cricket or rugby or motorsport or whatever. I just want to watch my team play.'”<\/p>\n
Taking its cue from the NFL, NBA and Formula 1, Duncanson believes the Premier League will increasingly evolve into a rights holder and broadcast platform.<\/p>\n
“The Premier League next season are going to start their own channel in Singapore. If that’s a success, you can see that being rolled out into other territories,” he said. <\/p>\n
“You’ll be watching ‘Premflix’ or ‘Fifa TV’ or ‘Uefa+’, or any of them who have got that level of valuable football.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1992, Sky won the rights to broadcast the newly established Premier League in a \u00a3304m five-year deal.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-565379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}