Recently, the Tommy Fury and Jake Paul boxing match has been a highly talked about event due to the build-up of the action. However, if you were intending on watching this event it would have set you back almost £20. As this was under A BT Sport Box Office event, it meant that those already with a BT Sport subscription had to pay extra on top of their overall subscription to watch – with the cheapest being £18 pound a month.
Alongside this, those who watch football are faced with the challenge of multiple subscriptions as matches in various tournaments are spread over multiple platforms. For example, the Premier League is broadcast on BT Sport, Sky Sports and Amazon Prime therefore viewers will need subscriptions to all services to stream these games. Sky Sport packages can range from £24-£46 at the moment, Prime also costs around £8.99 alongside the lowest priced BT package. This is only for coverage of some matches as we are aware many are not televised over the UK. It is not fair to make people pay for multiple subscriptions when they cannot get everything out of it that they want – especially in the current cost of living crisis access to sports events can be difficult. This can lead people to making decisions over which sports and events they may prefer to watch if they’re only able to afford one subscription.
There are many events which people are able to watch without these such as FA Cup and the World Cup yet some of these are on BBC which obviously requires a paid TV licence.
This is still apparent in a time when the government wants to crack down on illegal streaming of sports. Many who don’t have particular subscriptions will find other ways to watch events, even if this is through illegal sources but if the coverage of sports was to be more accessible to people maybe they would not have this issue in the first place.
I think that sport events need to be made more accessible for people and the likes of providing three televised matches a week for almost £30 a month is not enough.
