Originally Posted by CharlesThompson
The clubs could really do a lot to help themselves here regarding TV coverage. To suggest that the TV companies should dedicate teams of cameramen, and production staff to every game in the country is so off the mark it's unbelievable. They will not do this simply because the cost compared to the income on a project of this type totally negates the opportunity.
What clubs, let's face it who need tv coverage, need to do is to make it easy for the TV companies to screen games from their stadia. The cost for a tv company to screen a live match in Ireland is somewhere in between €20k - €25k per match. A sizeable amount of this cost is taken up with logistics and labour i.e. running cables, setting up camera positions etc.
I would suggest that if each club took it upon themselves to install a cable infrastructure at their ground which effectively allowed a plug and play scenario for the TV Co.'s then the clubs could then gain more money from the tv companies for screening the games, the TV companies could still save money on screening the games and their would be a better spread of games shown on the TV. In order to minimise the cost of implementing such an infrastructure, the eL or FAI should tender for the job and take the money for this from grant money due to clubs.
ANother fact already alluded to earlier in the thread is that the general positive look and feel on the TV of our matches is non existent because most of the grounds look like crap. This is why SKY for instance, who would be interested in showing live games in the Friday night schedule, do not show any eL matches even during the summer months when there is little or no live football available to their audience in the UK. This is important because if they grounds were up to scratch, the betting companies are willing to support the cost of screening matches because let's face it, there are more than enough people willing to bet on two flies going up a wall and football would sell in the UK if even for the summer.
Well that's all I have to add at the moment, apologies if I've strayed off topic slightly, but they are considerations I think are well worth mentioning at this point.