Sam Maguire permutations

[bennydorano]

The Gaa will reap what they sow with GAAGO, a clamour for money from the trough from the GPA. It will also do for the GAA what moving to Racing TV has done for horse racing in Ireland- absolutely f**k all.

I've bought 2 GAAGO matches so far and it really does bug me, especially as someone who went back to a Sky sub largely for the GAA.

Boxing was  the same. Loved the  big fights in the   late 80s/early 90s, Eubank Benn etc.  Some great bouts. Since  most matches went to sky , I have no idea  who  any fighters are (except maybe frampton),  and have  now no interest whatsoever in it.

Gaago will go the  same way. We need  kids looking up to gaa players and   Seeing  them as much as possible on tv.

Sky has actually lost most of the top boxing to DAZN - a further subscription only service! Everything you used to get in some shape or form relatively cheaply, has been hived off, repackaged & sold back to you as a niche subscription. The likes of Netflix were at least new and innovative, a lot of the other stuff is just outright gouging.

I honestly think the escalation of GAAGO on the island of Ireland will hasten inter county professionalism. Players aren't blind or stupid and the GPA are watching closely imo.

[RedHand88]

The Gaa will reap what they sow with GAAGO, a clamour for money from the trough from the GPA. It will also do for the GAA what moving to Racing TV has done for horse racing in Ireland- absolutely f**k all.

I've bought 2 GAAGO matches so far and it really does bug me, especially as someone who went back to a Sky sub largely for the GAA.

Boxing was  the same. Loved the  big fights in the   late 80s/early 90s, Eubank Benn etc.  Some great bouts. Since  most matches went to sky , I have no idea  who  any fighters are (except maybe frampton),  and have  now no interest whatsoever in it.

Gaago will go the  same way. We need  kids looking up to gaa players and   Seeing  them as much as possible on tv.

I grew up in an era where I saw Tyrone games on TV maybe 2 or max 3 times a year, and only then if you got to the latter stages of the championship. Still knew every player,  their club etc. And this was before any Internet.

The greedy people are the ones demanding everything for free all of the time.

[Rossfan]

People who go to matches have to pay to see them.
Yet armchair sports viewers who haven't gone to a game of anything in years are up in arms because all inter County GAA games aren't free for them.
Sod them I say!!!

[bennydorano]

People who go to matches have to pay to see them.
Yet armchair sports viewers who haven't gone to a game of anything in years are up in arms because all inter County GAA games aren't free for them.
Sod them I say!!!

That's not the case tho. Mugs like me are paying for everything they're not physically at and I'm sure plenty more like me.

[rrhf]

were people complaining about tyrone gaa having thier championship games behind a paywall

There were plenty and I understand this. But this could also be an important source of revenue for counties and I believe clubs in the future. Those who pay in to see a club game and who watch it behind a paywall know that their money is helping the GAA in Tyrone and we are very serious about that. I think that the GAAgo coverage is more of an excuse to charge plenty of Tyrone people who will be unable to afford or make a 10 hour round trip. They know who will be paying to watch. With so much football options on it will not be neutrals watching. It will not be Galway people watching as they are at home. It is to catch the Tyrone people full stop.

[armaghniac]

were people complaining about tyrone gaa having thier championship games behind a paywall

There were plenty and I understand this. But this could also be an important source of revenue for counties and I believe clubs in the future. Those who pay in to see a club game and who watch it behind a paywall know that their money is helping the GAA in Tyrone and we are very serious about that. I think that the GAAgo coverage is more of an excuse to charge plenty of Tyrone people who will be unable to afford or make a 10 hour round trip. They know who will be paying to watch. With so much football options on it will not be neutrals watching. It will not be Galway people watching as they are at home. It is to catch the Tyrone people full stop.

There is a touch of mopery about this, the people from the county with the home game will still be paying into the match or paying to watch and the revenue helps the GAA also.

[Sportacus]

The Gaa will reap what they sow with GAAGO, a clamour for money from the trough from the GPA. It will also do for the GAA what moving to Racing TV has done for horse racing in Ireland- absolutely f**k all.

I've bought 2 GAAGO matches so far and it really does bug me, especially as someone who went back to a Sky sub largely for the GAA.

Boxing was  the same. Loved the  big fights in the   late 80s/early 90s, Eubank Benn etc.  Some great bouts. Since  most matches went to sky , I have no idea  who  any fighters are (except maybe frampton),  and have  now no interest whatsoever in it.

Gaago will go the  same way. We need  kids looking up to gaa players and   Seeing  them as much as possible on tv.

I grew up in an era where I saw Tyrone games on TV maybe 2 or max 3 times a year, and only then if you got to the latter stages of the championship. Still knew every player,  their club etc. And this was before any Internet.

The greedy people are the ones demanding everything for free all of the time.

Do you still buy an Irish News?

[Captain Obvious]

The Gaa will reap what they sow with GAAGO, a clamour for money from the trough from the GPA. It will also do for the GAA what moving to Racing TV has done for horse racing in Ireland- absolutely f**k all.

I've bought 2 GAAGO matches so far and it really does bug me, especially as someone who went back to a Sky sub largely for the GAA.

Boxing was  the same. Loved the  big fights in the   late 80s/early 90s, Eubank Benn etc.  Some great bouts. Since  most matches went to sky , I have no idea  who  any fighters are (except maybe frampton),  and have  now no interest whatsoever in it.

Gaago will go the  same way. We need  kids looking up to gaa players and   Seeing  them as much as possible on tv.

I grew up in an era where I saw Tyrone games on TV maybe 2 or max 3 times a year, and only then if you got to the latter stages of the championship. Still knew every player,  their club etc. And this was before any Internet.

The greedy people are the ones demanding everything for free all of the time.

Do you still buy an Irish News?

Speaking of the Irish News Cahair O'Kane


We're not ready for GAAGO, and it isn't ready for us

IT would have been very easy for RTE to throw a sheet over the mirror rather than allow Donal Óg Cusack and Jackie Tyrrell to peer into it on Sunday night.

Given that the Cork-Tipperary game in particular turned out to be a classic that hadn't been widely available to television viewers, they could have taken more time to dissect the nuts and bolts of it.

Instead they gave their pundits a platform for some introspection.

You don't see that very often, anywhere. Usually the last person to blame for anything is the one in the mirror.   

When GAAGO was an ugly duckling, it seemed there was a beautiful swan within.

In times of Covid, it provided outstanding service. Virtually the whole National League, across all four divisions, was available to either stream live or watch back on demand.

The big championship games were still carved up for TV between RTÉ and Sky but the vast majority were available for online customers to watch back at any time.

For the eight years that it existed, there was vocal opposition to the Sky deal.

Some were no less vehemently against it at the end than they had been in the beginning.


BBC making a play for greater access harmed Sky's position.

There was nowhere left for Sky to go. They got thrown whatever was on a Saturday evening, a couple of decent qualifiers, their share of All-Ireland quarter-finals and a whole lot fewer subscriptions than they would have wanted because of the rise of dodgy boxes.

£50-odd a month or £100 a year (allegedly)? Legal shmegal.

Paywalls are proven to be damaging to the visibility of sport, and if left long enough, the sport itself.

Cricket, rugby, Premier League, Champions League, you name it, they've all taken the envelope and said to hell with the eyeballs.

Where they differ is that none of them have given the kind of precedence to a streaming service that the GAA have to GAAGO.

Amazon Prime has less than 10 per cent of live Premier League games shown this season.

Prime get 20. BT Sport have 53 and Sky show over 140.

It is pretty much an experiment. See how it runs a few Wednesday nights a year.

How fast the pictures can be transmitted through the internet compared to a standard television signal is the big issue in the world of instantaneous information.

If the goal is 10 seconds late on your screen, chances are you'll already know from your simultaneous scrolling that it's been scored.

GAAGO will show a total of 38 exclusive championship games from 2023 until 2018.

RTÉ television will show 31 plus the Joe McDonagh cup final, both Tailteann cup semi-finals and final.

That means GAAGO is showing 52 per cent of what is being shown live for the next five years.

The subscription element of GAAGO is one thing.

Paywalls are not good for the GAA and they're not good for supporters.

But when I purchased the Early Bird deal away back when it was announced, it cost €59 for the year. That's less than €2 a game, compared to the €13 people are now paying to buy access to individual games.

As subscriptions go, it wasn't wholly unreasonable. I'm still against the idea but it doesn't feel like a fleecing either.

The bigger problem here is that nobody is quite ready for streaming to take over.

Ireland as a country isn't ready for it. While 96 per cent of homes have access to fixed broadband, in the border (77 per cent) and midland (79 per cent) regions that figure drops way down.

There are plans to develop and improve it, but we're not there yet. The cables, like everything else, get rolled out from Dublin and can take a long time to reach Sligo or Donegal.

The platform itself can be clunky. I'm as tech savvy as any other 34-year-old, but just for a trial on Sunday night, I tried to cast a replay of Antrim-Kilkenny to my TV. There was no cast button in sight.

Football and especially hurling are not games to be consumed whole on a mobile phone.

Aside from the visibility, there's also the communal aspect of people in a room being able to watch it together on a TV screen.

Even if it had worked, in terms of live games, casting is not available on all TV sets and isn't all that handy to do is some cases. It usually comes with a further built-in time delay in transmitting the picture from phone to TV.

The coverage from the games they've done coverage from has seemed good, with Paddy Andrews, Marc Ó Sé and Michael Murphy a fairly strong team for Derry-Monaghan, to lend an example.

Mike Finnerty and Dave McIntyre are excellent commentators, as Grainne McElwain is a host.

But they've also had games with no build-up or pitchside analysis.

And that's grand when it's an alternative. When it's the place you go to for the games that you wouldn't ordinarily expect to see on your terrestrial TV station.

It's not grand for a broadcaster with exclusivity on more than half of the games every summer.

On Saturday 20 May, GAAGO will show Kerry v Mayo and then Galway v Tyrone.

Those are not only the two big ties of that weekend, but probably the two biggest ties of the entire round robin series.

Hurling has been here for a few weeks already. 

The blowback ought be loud.

Like most things, this kind of slipped beneath the radar. It was as if Sky are gone, Hallelujah, who cares what happens now.

The Sky deal was many things but one thing you couldn't accuse them of was a bad package. Even the biggest begrudger would admit they did analysis well.

You either had Sky or you didn't. If you had it, you had it on your TV.

A streaming platform, by its nature, will run a number of seconds behind. In a fast-paced, high-scoring sport like hurling, seconds can be a long time.

An email from GAAGO to customers last week conceded that there were some "teething issues" on their opening weekend.

More worryingly, it told recipients that they were having issues with payment through Android phones and that they should purchase via "the website instead".

Given that around 52 per cent of phone users in Ireland use Android, it's the kind of glitch that tells you this thing isn't at the level it needs to be at to occupy the position it now holds.

GAAGO will be a great service in time. It was brilliant during Covid, and as an alternative option for secondary games that might not have squeezed their way into the TV schedule, it would have been invaluable.

But it's a massive error on the GAA's part to have made it a primary broadcaster and to have given it so many games of such significance at this point in its existence.

In his annual report, Tom Ryan said that the big advantage was that GAAGO "will give us complete flexibility and control over match selection, scheduling and how we promote our games".

The other big advantage might be some flexibility in the contracts. It's not a multi-billion pound foreign entity they've signed up with. It's part-owned by the GAA and RTÉ.

You would think in the circumstances, where it's the same vested parties from both sides of it, there has to be some wiggle-room.

Streaming is the future. Eventually it will all go that way.

But it's not the present, least of all for the GAA.

This is a move for years down the line, once the technology is tightened up and readily available to virtually everyone in the country, and when bigger sporting organisations have shown how to lead their broadcast package with it.

[blanketattack]

The Gaa will reap what they sow with GAAGO, a clamour for money from the trough from the GPA. It will also do for the GAA what moving to Racing TV has done for horse racing in Ireland- absolutely f**k all.

I've bought 2 GAAGO matches so far and it really does bug me, especially as someone who went back to a Sky sub largely for the GAA.

Boxing was  the same. Loved the  big fights in the   late 80s/early 90s, Eubank Benn etc.  Some great bouts. Since  most matches went to sky , I have no idea  who  any fighters are (except maybe frampton),  and have  now no interest whatsoever in it.

Gaago will go the  same way. We need  kids looking up to gaa players and   Seeing  them as much as possible on tv.

I grew up in an era where I saw Tyrone games on TV maybe 2 or max 3 times a year, and only then if you got to the latter stages of the championship. Still knew every player,  their club etc. And this was before any Internet.

The greedy people are the ones demanding everything for free all of the time.

I agree, there's a level of entitlement to access everything for free these days - banking, online newspapers, sports events, people giving out about having to pay for them.
I remember when there were only 3 gaelic football games on TV back in 1990 and before - two semis and final.
If you wanted to watch a game you watched it in person, otherwise you listened to it on the radio and watched the Sunday Game. Now snowflakes young and old, expect to just be an armchair fan and see every game for free.

[onefineday]

Just buy the dodgy stick lads. f**k the greedy bastards and their GAA GO.

Who exactly are the greedy bastards? The cameramen? The sound operators? The pundits?

The gaa would be my guess? The people you mention would be employed regardless of how the final product was offered to the public.
From a promotional p.o.v gaago appears incredibly badly thought out. People make valid points about how it's still cheaper than going to a game etc, but the point being lost is that only those from the county or with a great interest in the sport (like posters on gaa discussion boards for example) will pay that money or even know how to go about accessing gaago. The floating sports fan is lost. Commercially does that make sense? The appeal of your product is diminished, advertising revenue gone and media rights into the future are reduced.
If gaago has a role it is in providing coverage of the non mainstream games - show the biggest games on FTA and keep gaago for the lesser games. How difficult would it be to stream all mcdonagh cup games, all tailteann cup games etc, we see it down in most counties now, this could make gaago serve a purpose.
Keep the biggest games each weekend FTA and use gaago to allow other fans who can't make it to matches to keep in touch.
For those who mentioned that rte couldn't show everything, that's why selling to different media outlets would have made sense, did TV3 have an interest this year for example?
I think this will prove a rare commercial misstep by the gaa, but time will tell.

[seafoid]

How people watch matches is changing. GAAGO caters to this.

[Hound]

The sense of entitlement from GAA people that all their county's matches should always be available live on free-to-air TV, continues to bewilder me.

On the topic

https://www.rte.ie/sport/hurling/2023/0508/1382379-martin-on-gaago-all-matches-should-be-free-to-air/

Absolutely idiotic statements.

Either the GAA more than halves the number of championship games, or RTE opens a deviated sports channel, or his wishes are basically impossible.

It's amazing how we cope with showing every match every day on free to air channels when the soccer and rugby world cups come around. Sometimes 4 games a day during the soccer!
2 games on a Saturday and 2 on a Sunday across the championship season across the free to air channels wouldn't really be a big deal to arrange. They've even used the RTE News channel as an overflow in the past for certain events.

I wonder how RTE would cope if the WC and RWC ran in parallel and only on weekends

The Rugby World Cup is on on mostly weekends this year. Every game will be available on free to view channels. Ireland v Netherlands in the soccer clashes with Wales v Fiji, but both will be live with no extra sub needed.

As mentioned, there is nobody asking for every single game to be covered, just 2 on Saturday and 2 on Sunday.

With all the criticism the round robin stages have received before a ball is even kicked, it seems a massive error not to have Kerry v Mayo and Galway v Tyrone on the telly. On paper the standout ties of all the groups. I hope those who haven't taken the plunge to spend more money stick with their principles. As Cahir pointed out, it's a mediocre unreliable service.

[naka]

It's a justifiable criticism regarding the screening of games given the amount of league games we were shown earlier on in the season.
Sundays offering on tv was awful given that we all knew how each game would play out.
Definitely think we could have to revisit this compact  season ( even push it til 3rd week in August ) given that nearly every club league in the country has started  already and genuinely the sheer price of going to these games.
Most teams will have up 5 games between may and beginning of July, that's some amount of money heading out of a house each week .

[seafoid]

The GAAGO situation is another unintended consequence of the split season. RTE naturally focus on the business end but the split season has
multiplied the number of games meaning that there is a concentration in May . And there is no way to predict which matches will be popular.

So it's time for the multipurpose Paraic Duffy Sky quote

https://www.rte.ie/sport/gaa/2014/0401/606068-oneill-denies-comments-were-insulting/

"Paraic Duffy and I are as conservative and traditional as you will get in the GAA. We are looking at a package here that will satisfy the broad group of people that we are trying to satisfy.
"If we want to concentrate on the number of games that are going to go (from free-to-air), there are five extra games that are going to be televised this year.
"Compared to last year, they are only nine games, not 14, that will be exclusively with Sky. Some people are saying they think it's time the thing was shaken up and those people are going to be happy. "Those that want to constantly refer to those that won't get to see those games will harp on and quite frankly you couldn't please everybody anyway and that's the nature of it."

Sin é

[giveballaghback]

Rte say they can't show them all, every game in the women's World Cup will be shown live this summer.
Look at their press release last October 24th. Right at the business end of the hurling and football year.