Insight Analysis: Viewers Will Resist Pay Per View TV, Says Survey
The last round of bidding for broadcasting rights to Premier League football matches not only raised unprecedented amounts of money for the league itself, but also ushered in what could be the future for making profit beyond ad revenue when screening matches. NTL won rights to show 44 matches as pay-per-view (PPV) events, but recent research by CIA Medialab suggests that it will not be an easy task persuading viewers to pay to see events, especially when they have previously been shown for free or as part of an existing subscription.
Programming viewers are already used to paying for includes football and films. It is therefore not too surprising that FA Cup Finals and movie premieres are the events most likely to attract a PPV audience. Even so, overall only 18% of those surveyed would pay to see the Cup Final and 15% a movie premiere. As with many of the events listed, the idea of paying to see the Cup Final or a movie was more acceptable to the younger, 15-34 age group. A total 26% said they would be willing to pay between £5 and £10 to see the football and 25% the movie. Sports events, including those currently available free on the BBC, such as Wimbledon and the Olympics, were among the events viewers thought they would be most likely to pay to see. However, terrestrial television ratings winners such as soap operas and royal weddings would not provoke much interest if they were PPV, according to the survey. Just 6% of all adults said they would pay to see a week of Eastenders or Coronation Street (11% of 15-34 year olds) and 4% a Royal Wedding (1% of 15-34 year olds).
Of all the adults surveyed, 75% thought that it was a bad idea for major events to be restricted to PPV. Even among those already willing to pay for their TV – cable, satellite and digital viewers – 74% said they didn’t think showing top events on pay TV was a good thing. However, the movement of increasing numbers of top sports events from the BBC to commercial and pay-TV channels has not provoked much support for a licence fee increase which could allow the BBC to compete in high cost TV rights bidding.
CIA Medialab found that 62% of all adults thought that the BBC shouldn’t be allowed to increase the licence fee. An even higher proportion (73%) of 25-34 year olds thought the fee should have to stay the same, but among the 15-24 age group – those more or less brought up with the concept of pay-TV – 40% thought it was okay for the licence fee to be raised.
The research suggests that broadcasters hoping to profit from PPV have some hard work ahead of them. One of them, Roger Hall, marketing director of u>direct tv commented: “It is usual for the public to react in this way to a new form of pay television, ten years ago there was a similar reaction to the concept of subscribing and commentators of the day insisted that pay-TV ‘would never take off’. It is up to broadcasters to provide the diversity of choice on pay-per-view necessary to give customers a real alternative to subscribing.”