Ordinary Gweilo

A few months ago, Now TV were offering subscriptions to ESPN & Star Sports at $78 per month.  Now it has become a Mega Sports Pack at HK$178 per month.  The "mega" seems to mean that as well as ESPN & Star Sport, you get Eurosport News (already available on Cable TV), Eurosport and an EPL channel.  They are offering 5 months free on an 18 month contract, which averages out at HK$128/month, and claim that this offer will end on 28 February.  You also need to subscribe to other channels to the value of at least HK$60. 

I suppose they will keep increasing prices until the start of the new season in August – if they can get away with it.

Eurosport has a rather strange history.  It was one of the early
channels available on satellite and cable in Europe, as a joint venture
between the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and Sky TV.  The idea was
simple enough – the broadcasters that made up the EBU owned the TV
rights to a large number of sporting events and shared them with each
other, but only had a limited amount of broadcast hours available.  So
they could use all that coverage to create a low-cost Europe-wide
sports channel with commentaries in multiple languages for different
countries, and Sky would sell and market it.

And pretty good it was too, if you could get over the fact that the commentator was in a studio hundreds or thousands of miles away from the event. 

The problem with this arrangement was that it
prevented anyone else buying up the TV rights, and the European Union
decided this was a bad thing.  By this time, Sky had merged with BSB,
which had its own sports channel (renamed to Sky Sports), and was happy
to abandon Eurosport.  The channel closed down, but was taken over by
French channel TF1 and started up again.

These days, TV rights
are much more valuable, and Eurosport is competing with channels such
as Sky Sports which have far more money, but there’s still a lot of
sport around.  I think they are able to show events such as
the World Cup, European Championships and Olympics that are purchased
by the EBU on behalf of all the national broadcasters, but things are different in Asia (for example the Hong
Kong rights to the World Cup are owned by Cable TV). 

So you have
to wonder how many people will be interested in Cross-Country skiing or
Figure Skating.