BT Sport - Launch of BT Sport Ultimate

To be fair to BT they are making the effort to keep certain events "free" for their non-sport pack customers, though surprised they're not just unencrpyting one of their extra channels for the additional stream tomorrow.

And to be unfair BT have announced how their customers will be funding Premier League footballers wages next season too - line rental up £1, BT Sport pack up from £5 to £6 and broadband and infinity up by a whopping 13%.
http://www.a516digital.com/2016/04/more-above-inflation-price-rises-from-bt.html

Virgin Sky Sports charges up £2.50 a month from next month too.

Today's Fletch & Sav is the last - it won't be returning next season.

Why I don't understand it was a good show.

Agreed. The only reason I can think of is that BT won't be broadcasting the Saturday lunchtime kick offs from next season, and the evening kick offs clash with 606 on 5 Live which they both host.

I hope to god BT won't be adopting the 'Saturday Night Football' format next season.

+1,

It's a shame they couldn't have brought it back for the FA cup next season.

The main reason Fletch and Sav exists is because it comes from the same venue as - and presumably uses the same facilities as - the live game, so I assume it costs virtually nothing to make. Now they're no longer showing the 12.45 games, it rather loses its value. If it stayed at 10am everyone would have to hang around for five hours after it before the live game, and there's no point at all doing it at 3pm because there's other football going on and so nobody would watch it. So that's the end of that.

I did watch it, but that had more to do with it being less dreadful than Soccer AM then any particular affection I had for it. Of course, Fletcher will still be doing his proper job for BT as a commentator so clearly he won't be able to do 606 next season.

I wonder if they might consider a rival to Soccer Saturday in an attempt to bring in the audience for the 5.30pm game earlier.

But it won't bring in an audience, really. There are two other score services at 3pm and they already have loyal audiences. BT wouldn't have the resources to do it either (not even sure they'd be able to get feeds of the 3pm games) so it would be massively boring. They tried to do something like it in the very first weeks and it was pretty hopeless, and since then they've massively cut down all their live studio programming like SportsHUB. Also, they've got live rugby at 3pm.

Setanta tried to do a scores service when they had Saturday teatime kick-offs and it was boring and was of no value. The matches themselves bring in the audience.

Presumably we won't see Premiership Rugby at 3:15pm and Premier League at 5:30pm on the same channel though? It'd not leave much time to hand over and I'd have thought BT will want to run the build up from no later than 5:00pm, maybe even as early as 4:30pm. That might have knock on effects for Premiership Rugby scheduling, whether it is in relation to the kick off time or to what channel it is on.

They could slot the rugby in the 12:45pm slot used at the moment and then run the second game at 3pm and keep it on BT Sport 1 unless BT are going to start the rumoured score service. In that situation maybe BT will put some Rugby games on a Monday night or add an extra Sunday game.

But if you move some rugby union games to a Monday night, that clashes with Rugby Tonight.

One possible idea I think is, to do what S4C done for the 1997-8 season of Y Clwb Rygbi. They had the show dual hosted. Firstly, Eleri Sion was in Cardiff, to give results of the days other games, with reports, before handing over to Russell Issacs at the ground where the live match was coming from.

BT Sport could done no harm in something like that. Remember it'll be in Saesneg, and not Cymraeg!