Why is it so difficult?
Put simply, Setanta, the company that has the most experience with this kind of thing, loses money showing Scotland matches. The costs involved in showing a match are fairly high (see below), but there are also challenges in bringing in revenue, as Scotland games tend to be on at the same time as games featuring Ireland, England, Greece, Poland and so on; all countries with bigger 1st generation expatriate communities. So bar owners tend to stick with the obvious money and go with the 'big' teams.
But we calculate that there is no need to lose money showing a scotland game. With a bit of coordination across the continent, and a little bit of word-of-mouth marketing, we should be able to bring the cost per head to a reasonably affordable amount.
Costs involved in getting TV coverage include
- The rights. These are sold by the FAs to media companies who then sell them on in packages. So for example, Setanta might own the rights to Scotland home games, but they would have bought them as part of a package. The value of individual rights appears to be in the order of several thousand dollars.
- Satellite bandwidth (assuming there is bandwidth available). Costs involved here are again in the order of several thousand dollars.
- Transmission costs & admin (i.e. cost to have BBC or SKY upload it to the satellite). This adds another few thousand dollars.
- Administrative overhead for carrier
- Carrier profits
So there are lots of challenges for us to overcome. We need to find a way of covering all of the above costs, of convincing a carrier company that it's worth doing, and we need to ensure good turnout across the continent.
Internet streaming is emerging as an alternative. Although it's not quite the same from a social perspective, and the quality is not yet as good as Satellite TV, at least we can watch the team when games are available on-line. Both internetfootball.co.uk and scotlandfootballtv.com have provided (legitimate) streaming of live games over the past couple of years. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next few years.