From the NBR -
Meanwhile, Fellet muses that after a poor first-half result, Sky TV boss John Fellet says the second half looks better, at least in terms of content that's likely to win back subs -- whether his company is standalone or combined with Vodafone:
"I’ve been in New Zealand for 26 years and by far the hottest ticket in a 12 year period is always the Lions’ tour. It’s even bigger for us than the Rugby World Cup"
"We’ve got the America’s Cup for the first time, so we’re pretty excited about that."
"The Rugby League World Cup is coming up later this year."
"Then on the entertainment side, the equivalent for the Rugby World Cup, [the new series] of Game of Thrones. And I think that’ll hit this market around June."
Lions' Tour - I'll give him that - dunno if it will win back subs but it might slow the rot with the diehards for a bit longer. You wonder if one day that SANZAR, the NZRFU or even the RWC are going to finally realise that they can disintermediate, produce and control the content themselves rather than allowing a broadcaster to skim the tab...
America's Cup - it's in Bermuda this time which isn't the greatest time zone slot in the world and we've never had the event on payTV so it will be interesting to see if they win back subs for this event.
RLWC - Yeah ok - there isn't a lot of depth in teams outside NZ, Australian and GB but yep diehards will be there but you can also see a lot of folk trying to stream the few games that will matter.
Game of Thrones - yes that's a drawcard. It's also the most heavily pirated series in history although to be fair Sky has tried to bring on the content as quickly as it screens elsewhere to counter that and HBO at least still screens the series in linear mode