GAA TV Rights 2023 on - Sky out, Saturday league games to RTE/TG4, Some C’ship games on GAA Go

Nail on head with the above.

This was a big hit (negatively) for GAA to lose the Sky rights. The big money is in selling rights still. Almost a guarantee they’ll be running at a loss with the GAA Go stuff, so that’s why I’d expect a gradual stripping down of quality of broadcast from initial matches to later in the season

The other point to make about the NFL Network deal is that a) it’s a full time broadcast channel, it doesn’t pop up just for the games and b) the games have to be carried on terrestrial channels in local markets

But as has been said, comparing the NFL to the GAA is insane

They might suprise us. I hope they do as i just bought it!

Exactly. TV revenue for all sports in Ireland is tiny. Nearly every major/professional league depends on them throughout the world but it’s not applicable here for a variety of reasons

LOI TV made a profit for clubs last year fwiw but the broadcast costs were kept down to a minimum. first year was a GAA Go run system (with RTE) but they went solo (contracted out) in 2022

It was accidentally blocked last year for a game I think but RTE has all island rights to the games so it shouldn't have happened.

RTÉ should be allowed to show these iPlayer games online at least.

Just thinking about this more closely. Could BBC not do with iplayer what TG4 do with their player .i.e. make it available worldwide but geo block just certain programmes that they have UK rights only for or does their charter prevent them doing so?

When it comes to streaming rights, RTÉ & TG4s provision for this outside the Republic of Ireland has long been problematic for many in NI, even when they indicate that it should be possible for viewers with an "NI IP address" to watch content. I'm not sure about these days, but I remember back in the days of dial-up and early ADSL internet access, the main Irish ISPs used to connect customers to a regional data centre, so for example someone connecting from Ballybofey using Telecom internet would be connected to a server based in Sligo. With a few exceptions (usually BT), most commercial ISPs in the UK never really did this regionalisation bit, instead they connected customers to various parts of the country. This meant that an awful lot of internet users (if not the majority) in NI, where their allocated IP address is geolocated, are traced to be coming from GB, which for the likes of RTÉ is a "no go". Complaints ring in about it to this day, for example snippets of match action placed on Twitter that is georestricted to the RoI only, but there's no easy way around this other than to use a VPN that has a server located in the Republic.

As to the GAA's "upgrading" of GAA Go for 2023, I see it as a classic case of an Irish solution to an Irish problem. I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest that a quiet approach was made to Virgin Media but they were told they were not interested and as a result have gone down this in-house route. If the experience in many Ulster counties is anything to go by, where streaming of club championship games have proven very popular - there was even a suggestion a couple of years ago that Tyrone declined an offer from TG4 to broadcast live a club SFC double-header as the money offered was dwarfed by the projected income they would have got from broadcasting the games themselves over the internet on PPV - then for those whom want to see a good bit more action than the casual viewer, the whole package at €79 IMO is a steal as long as the production values are half decent (and even more so when it was €59 before the end of last month). A few other sporting bodies elsewhere I'm sure will be watching how this all pans out for the GAA.