Well, it’s a Saturday and I would, in normal times, be down the pub watching rugby, but that’s a distant dream now.
In looking for the alternatives it has become apparent that there is a massive gap in the market for a sports Netflix.
Let me summarise what is available for me to watch on a rainy Saturday in the UK:
BBC - two Scottish internationals from the last century
ITV - nothing
Channel4 - nothing
Five - nothing
S4C (Welsh language TV) - two Scarlets games and a lockdown show about rugby players
Netflix - nothing
Amazon Prime - decent doc on the All Blacks but no games
BT Sport - a decent set of ‘’extended highlights”
Now TV - I have cut my sports subs since they never had on demand sports
Premier Sports - a good few full length games from the last season
Yes, I could cobble together a sad day’s viewing, but come on... The lack of imagination and enterprise at TV services beggars belief, especially when there is no particular cost or restriction to making content available on on demand services.
I tried to find out if there is a massive rights problem here, but even the lawyer who advises many of the Tv companies and Federations and my colleagues at Rights Tracker were none the wiser.
So, it seems that my rainy Saturday may be buried in a thousand contracts buried in a thousand dusty filing cabinets.