Racing TV and Sky Sports Racing may be affected by new gambling bill

The suggestion is that there’s no sound rationale to distinguish between horse racing and other sports in this regard, horse racing is not the only sport that bets are placed on.

Having the capacity to replace UK with Irish advertising doesn’t mean it can be done in all cases. That is not a cost free endeavour. There is a finite pot of buying available, a broadcaster has to weigh up the cost of additional satellite space, EPG charges etc and hope that the revenue they will attract will at least pay for the costs of offering the service. Despite this one consequence of this move is that this may be the spur for several channels that don’t currently have ROI advertising opt outs to launch them, I am thinking TNT Sports in particular, having seen several gambling adverts on it during this weeks FAPL midweek fixtures.

However it may also be the case that rather than turn down gambling adverts other broadcasters, who are not particularly targeting Ireland, will pull their services from Ireland entirely. This isn’t scaremongering, we saw this post Brexit when several UK broadcasters pulled their services from ROI EPGs rather than take out EU licenses because it didn’t pay for them to do so.

Having publicly said they will do withdraw from the Irish market they (Sky-ATR and RTV) kind of have to go through with it. Still don’t get how Sky Sports Golf merits an opt out on advertising revenue (and I am partial to a bit of the PGA Tour from time to time) but Sky Sports Racing doesn’t. I suspect it could be made work, but having made the threat they have to follow through with it.

It could, I guess, if they are able to pull out of their existing deals, they could probably argue that this is an event outside their control which means that they could hand back the rights.

But who would pick them up? VMTV already don’t show all of the horse racing that’s available for them to show, as part of their deal for ITV Racing. What makes you think they would pick up more at this point?

Maybe the Irish side of what Racing TV have. Would cash strapped RTE be willing to pick up the day to day stuff for broadcast to a small audience during the day on weekdays, constrained by the same limitation on selling betting advertising? For TG4, the issue is they’d need to do their own presentation and commentary, and wouldn’t be able to rely on any “world feed” in that regard, because it would have to be in Irish. Again would the costs outweigh the benefits of mainly daytime programming to a small audience?

Unless Premier Sports, perhaps, might be interested and if they could make it work by simply relaying RTV (as Setanta did in the past - remember that giant full colour DOG to overlay over the RUK, as was, one?).

But either way, and discounting VMTV who already can’t show all the racing they have rights to, I can’t see any taker for the sheer breadth of what might come on the market if these channels go, and I imagine only a fraction of the more attractive meetings would be picked up.

The issue is that they don’t have a separate Irish feed and they don’t want to have one (they say it doesn’t pay).

In fact they are required to have an EU license (not necessarily and in fact unlikely to be Irish) to broadcast in Ireland already, and that has been the case since Brexit. (Before Brexit a UK license would have done fine for Ireland). That doesn’t alleviate them of the need to have a UK license too, and to follow Ofcom’s rules, in respect of broadcasting in the UK. With a single feed serving both UK and Ireland they effectively have to follow both sets of rules.

They are denying that was ever the case now, apparently. And of course they would have to as they are running on the argument that separate feeds are unviable.

To be fair in the case of the solution which was suggested, if it is against Ofcom rules in the UK, then I don’t see how it could be implemented without having totally separate channels for the UK and Ireland - I mean not just separate advertising but separate presentation too. That would alleviate any duty to abide by Ofcom rules, but the costs would be far more than simply setting up a separate Irish advertising opt out, so I don’t see it how it could be more valuable even with bookies paying more for airtime.