Soccer fans in the US are familiar with beIN Sports, which broadcasts Spanish La Liga, Italian Serie A, and French Ligue 1 games. They also show the English Championship division, US NASL and some other soccer, plus a variety of other sports like Formula 1, Giro D’Italia, etc… They also have a Spanish language channel, which often shows games that are going on at the same time, e.g. Barcelona game on one channel and Juventus on the other. They have English and Spanish broadcasters for all games, so I can watch a game on the Spanish channel, switch the language on my tv, and hear it in English. They always have their own broadcast teams, i.e. they don’t borrow feeds of other channels. Plus, they manage to air just about every big game. The only time that I can potentially miss a big game amongst the 3 major soccer leagues is if there are three occurring at the same time.
All of that sounds pretty expensive, right? And they probably have only a tiny fraction of the budget of an ESPN or Fox Sports. So how do they do it? Well, one thing I noticed early on is that they don’t actually send production teams to the arenas. The announcers are basically in a room watching the game on tv, just like the viewers. I watch the channel just about every day and you never hear an announcer give any information that’s not apparent from the screen, which tells me that they don’t have any other alternate feeds. It’s basically like the announcers are sitting in your living room watching the game with you. And oftentimes, you’ll hear the same announcers that just did a game being played in Madrid announce another game a couple hours later that’s being played in Milan. So their only significant costs are the rights to air the games and the video feeds. Pretty brilliant if you don’t mind not getting some of the off-video information that in-person announcers provide. Is this broadcasting model common in other parts of the world?
By the way, one of their color commentators Ray Hudson is a classic who is very entertaining. I love watching games that he’s broadcasting.
I don’t know about other parts of the world. But I remember hearing an interview with an American Network Soccer announcer (working for NBC Sports now) who has been doing this since the 94 world cup (don’t remember which one, sorry for being vague) saying that when he started out working for ESPN that’s how all ESPN soccer coverage was done and that it was very strange coming from doing broadcasts in the UK. Maybe it was Arlo White? I believe I heard it on Men In Blazers.
Maybe someone else can help me out and get more specific.
Ray Hudson sounds like he is jacking off when he commentates.
I have beIN and have a gripe with them: while showing the replay of the KHL Gagarin Cup Game 7 between CSKA and Mettallurg, at the bottom of the screen they scrolled the results. IIRC, they’ve done this with other games as well, not getting that not everyone can take their time out of the day to witness a game from Europe, and can only watch at 12 or 1pm. :mad:
Yes, they do this with all games. It’s probably not that easy to get their ticker feed to skip over the game that is on at the time. They should at least have a way to cover it. I don’t really mind it since I need to know what happened asap. I can’t convince myself to watch a game on delay feel natural. So I’ll check the score and then still watch it.
Not me, I have to work during the day and can easily avoid knowing who won the KHL final or the CBA championship between the Xijang Tigers and Shunyang Daragons theres no reason for beIN to scroll the results of those games the first 24 hours after the results, anyone that wants to know right away can go online. Its 2016 and thats bad work by beIN.
beIN Sports is an international network, just not in the US. The ownership is Qatari and it was originally a spinoff of Al Jazeera. So they have a large pot of money behind them and presumably little pressure to make a profit.
I notice that for much of their sports portfolio that I tune in for (MotoGP/cycling), they don’t have their own announcers, they use the “world feed” English announcers. They have a studio host and an expert for the MotoGP coverage, but they don’t actually call the race. I presume that makes the broadcasting thing a little cheaper.