Traditionally, if you want to watch the England football team, you turn to the television. Since the use of the television became widespread in England, every single game (competitive or friendly) has been shown live on British TV. Not any more though.
In a fascinating move that could entirely break television’s dominance over British sport, Kentaro, the company that own the rights to the match, have decided not to sell the game to a television company. Instead, they’ve decided that their best option to make a profit from the Ukraine vs England match comes from making the game available only on the internet.
In order to make money from the game, they will sell virtual tickets to viewers who will then watch a high quality online stream of the game. Tickets aren’t cheap, ranging from £4.99 for those earliest to book, to £11.99 for those who book tickets on the day of the match itself. But Kentaro have taken the sensible step of ensuring that a maximum of 1 million tickets will be sold. This will go a long way to making sure that the company’s servers can handle the strain of streaming video to so many viewers simultaneously.
If all goes well, Kentaro could earn between £5 million and £12 million from the sales of online tickets alone. And, if they can scale this up for future matches (England matches can attract audiences of tens of millions), they could be bringing in upwards of a hundred million pounds per game. This would be a staggering increase in income, which would do wonders to boost football’s coffers.
Camisetas Hungría Un jugador muere por un golpe en un partido de fútbol. EFE. Javier Tebas acompaña la cena de Nochebuena de Cruz Blanca Huesca.