The Sport Thread

Rare piece of good news for the BDO after the BBC dropped the BDO World Darts Championships and the fiasco around the new tournaments at the start of the year which have already been cancelled and DeLuxe. According to the article Dave will air ten hours of live coverage running from 12pm to 10pm each day of the event which is being promoted by Frank Warren who I hope as a darts fan can drag the BDO into the 21st century a bit like Barry Hearn did with the PDC.

Just to keep up with my regular poor journalism rant Mark Sweney wrote an article in the Guardian about this news and it is full of errors, it states that BT Sport broadcast the BDO World Darts Championship exclusively since the BBC decided to axe coverage of the event after 28 years. BBC have shown BDO World Darts Championships from 1978 so 38 years and BT have never shown Darts exclusively only alongside the BBC and apparently BT Sport are not interested in showing the event exclusively and the BDO have stated they want to keep the event on free to air tv.

You can see this article below:
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/04/dave-uktv-darts-bdo-world-trophy-david-haye

In other words, the BDO will give Dave a made for tv tournament to see how they do, and if they don't make a hash of it, the live tv rights for Lakeside Worlds next January is theirs..

Wonder who the production company is?

Interesting for Dave to go off format for so long. Wonder if they will keep a normal schedule going on Dave ja vu?

Dave will also show David Haye's next fight on 21 May - http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/06/david-hayes-fight-arnold-cobra-gjergjaj-uktv-dave

They're not going off format - they're evolving their format and darts probably fits better there than it would on a sports channel.

Any increase in sport on FTA television can only be a good thing IMO, even if it is on Dave. But as the Breakfast one says () it actually suits a channel like Dave rather than relying on Top Gear reruns all the time.

And Dave is only FTA on Freeview in SD isn't it? On satellite it's pay-TV on Sky for both SD and HD versions. So no FTA on satellite and no FTA HD anywhere.

Dave is also FTA on TV Player, alas in SD.

Presumably because TV Player is a loophole isn't it? (It treats itself as a cable equivalent carrying FTA - Freeview I think - channels)

Everybody has access to Freeview one way or another if the TV has it, or you have a box or whatever. The resolution of the picture doesn't change the basic fact Dave is technically FTA through Freeview. We're not all interested in UHD/4k or even HD for that matter.

Not everyone has access to Freeview. Dave is on a COM mux, which has less coverage than the PSB Freeview-lite muxes. And there are quite a lot of CATV systems that switched from terrestrial to satellite at (or before) DSO. Lots of people have Freeview. But not everyone.

For satellite only homes, Dave is not FTA.

I'm not quite sure, but when a UKTV channel goes FTA on Freeview, they remove it from their TV Player Plus paywall and add it to the free section as they recently did with Home.

TV Player has a complex deal with UKTV for their pay channels where they can't show them on the Amazon Fire TV and Stick app, but is perfectly fine to watch on PC/Mac, Amazon Fire tablets, iOS and Android.

Eurosport 1/2 isn't allowed to be watched by any TV Player Plus customer on the 30 day trial.