Home Of Tong

When Starhub won the bid to the BPL TV rights, I already sense trouble. Now into their 2nd season, things have not improved. Break in transmission, mediocre pre and post match program, no pre and post match program on other channels showing ‘live’ game, matches not shown, etc…

The biggest problem is perhaps the break in transmission that is happening ever so often. In their 1st season, I can accept that they are still in their learning phase, but now in the 2nd season, things are still happening. Just this morning during the Arsenal-Spurs match, with about 5 mins to go and the match entering an important phase as Arsenal was leading 4-2 but Spurs hoping to do a come back, the transmission got lose for 4 whole mins! And during this time we miss a goal from Spurs that set up an exciting finale which they eventually managed to equalise deep in injury time. Imagine if the transmission did not come back in time.

While I am neither a gunners or spurs fan, I can imgine their frustration as this has happened during Liverpool matches before. The worst so far on this break in transmission is 1 whole half of the match missing. They blame it on the satallite feed they got and claim there is nothing they can do about it, but I have NEVER seen this happening in my many many years watching on ESPN. Perhaps they need to think about backup plan.

Another thing that frustrate me is that there are 9 matches played today, yet only 2 matches are shown ‘live’ with NONE, yes NONE shown ‘delayed’. They have at least 3 channels capable of showing matches but why only 2 matches? They promise to show 370 matches in a season (‘live’ or delayed) out of the 380 (see Starhub Press Release) and we are barely into the season and already 7 games are not shown in 1 single day, and I do recall a couple of weeks back where they are some matches not shown. So what happen to the justification of the price increase that we will be seeing more games?

And the SportsHD channel is a big joke, with almost nothing shown on it for the entire week except the occasional matches (up to 2 a week they promise – see Starhub Press Release). Why have a channel and only show 2 program a week??? I cannot understand the logic, is it a case of Starhub running out of contents? Might as well mix it with one of the other HD channels, which are showing nothing but repeats. We do not want to have lots of channels to choose, we want channels with good contents to view.

With Champions/UEFA league out of Starhub’s radar next season, I am beginning to wonder if I should continue to pay $25 a month for the sports channel. The worst is yet to come as once the TV rights expire next year, rather the 2009-2010 season, expect a bidding war from SingTel for the season starting 2010. If Starhub loses it, they can kiss their sports channel goodbye, if they win it, we can kiss our wallet goodbye. Either way, we lose. With the economic crisis looming, can’t they do one thing? Collaboration instead of cutting each other throat. Then again, it’s a war out there and nobody wants to lose.

Tags: BPL, champions league, english league, football, football channel, Premier League, singtel, soccer, starhub, tv rights, uefa cup

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 7:16 am and is filed under Premier League. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.