Ciarán Murphy: Hard to see new GAA media deal being a good one for the consumer

I want you to close your eyes. Picture the scene. It’s a farmhouse in Lecarrow in Roscommon. It’s a fine house now, built 100 years ago or more, but in it lives an old man, 82 next birthday. He’s a bachelor, never married. A fine big house for a family that never came. He’s the last of his people, scratching out a living there on the shores of Lough Ree. Can you picture him?

A dog beside him as he sits by the range (the dog is not long for this world either, but maybe that’s laying it on too thick.) He used to go to the games of course – he thought the world of Dermot Early senior, God be good to him. Never saw a man like him under a dropping ball.

But since the eyes started to go, he’s happy enough to watch away on the telly, or maybe rely on Willie Hegarty on Shannonside ... and now you’re telling that man he has to go and get a satellite dish, to watch the Rossies on *spit* Sky *spit* Sports?

This was basically the tenet of much of the criticism of the Sky Sports deal to show GAA championship games when it was first announced in 2014. I mean, maybe I’m over-egging it slightly, but not by much. The auld fellah in Lecarrow (or wherever) was called upon to do a lot of rhetorical heavy lifting, whether his rheumatoid arthritis could handle it or not.

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They may be able to turn a profit on that in five years via subscriptions, but given the regularity with which RTÉ tell us how expensive live sport is, I’ll believe it when I see it

Well I’ve got news that won’t go down well in Lecarrow, because that fellah just got screwed again. Even assuming our friend has a laptop, and a HDMI cable, and a credit card, and a neighbour (perhaps one sniffing around the inheritance) to help him set all this up, he will still be reliant on rural broadband to be able to sit down and watch his beloved Rossies on GAAGO on his television.

This new agreement, which sees GAAGO take over Sky’s part of the live broadcast pie, is just a bad deal for the consumer.

When Sky became a GAA broadcast partner, it won’t have cost many (not all, but many) sports fans an extra penny. If soccer, rugby, golf or the NFL was your main sport, then you got the GAA as an added bonus for what you were already paying for.

And if you were a GAA fan signing up for Sky for the first time, you got all those sports as your added bonus. We don’t know what the pricing will look like for GAAGO, and there will be a yearly discount price, an all-championship pass, or whatever, but that’s money that people will have to find, on top of whatever TV subscriptions they’re already paying for.

[ Seán Moran: GAA’s brave new media world arrives more quickly than anticipated ]

The key argument against Sky was always that if you signed up you were giving money to Rupert Murdoch, in spirit if not in reality. But who is paying for GAAGO?

GAAGO is a joint RTÉ/GAA service, and all the noises coming out of RTÉ for the last 10 years is that they are cash-strapped.

So it will fall to the GAA to invest that money to get production values up to broadcast quality. Selling TV rights was supposed to be about making money, not spending it. They may be able to turn a profit on that in five years via subscriptions, but given the regularity with which RTÉ tell us how expensive live sport is, I’ll believe it when I see it.

GAAGO is a fine service for ex-pats as currently constituted, but as Seán Moran wrote on these pages yesterday, this is coming rather sooner than the GAA would have predicted. In five years it might have had a suite of midweek shows, presenters and producers ready and itching for this challenge, but that will all have to be built from scratch between now and next year.

This year the offering for games being shown in Ireland solely on GAAGO was at a lower standard than the Irish Examiner’s coverage of the Cork club championships, with fewer cameras, fewer analysts and fewer production staff. That is obviously going to change, and that will obviously cost a lot of money.

There’s a battle taking place, within Croke Park and the higher echelons of the GAA, between those who look on it as a community organisation, and those whose job it is to maximise the association’s commercial opportunities. The split season might be looked on very favourably by some in Croke Park, but for those who are paid to be only interested in the commercial side of things, they no doubt look on it as a disaster.

That subset of people in Croke Park would nod approvingly at critics of the split season who talk about ‘handing August and September over to other sports’. If you follow your club team, or the club scene generally, there’s plenty of GAA out there for you – but if you don’t, then your floating eyeballs will be drawn elsewhere.

If broadcast deals are about anything, they’re surely about maximising revenue, and bringing the game to wider audiences. What makes the GAA think they can attract those floating eyeballs to a streaming service the association will have to bankroll themselves?