Southern Hemisphere Rugby Union Coverage

[A.R.C]

If Amazon pick it up they won't get any of my money, and I would consider that SKY might not get my SKY Sports either.

[Postie1]

It's interesting the lack of information sky have put out about them dropping the coverage of super rugby. 

They seem to have placed all their efforts towards the British Lions tour and dropped the bread and butter rugby coverage.

I'm seriously considering cancelling my sky sports as my first sports love is rugby which seems to be the sport they have least interest in. 

[TomJ123]

I'm very disappointed that sky will not be showing the super rugby NZ this year and have only just learned about it this morning after getting concerned how little news they were reporting on regarding it. 

I think I'll be cancelling my sky sports package as the rugby now is almost non existent on the platform. I have woken up every weekend at 6am for the past 15 years during the seasons to tune in to the matches over there. 

[graceland22]

t has already kicked off and SKY UK are not showing it, nor the NZ version. It is ironic because The sponsor stuff shows SKY Aotearoa and they will be broadcast in NZ /Aus on SKY / Channel Nine. 
Thus one would have thought that SKY UK would therefore be able to get a favourable deal.

Lost French Top 14 RU. Lost all UK RU (we used to get some of the Campionship). Lost AUS /NZ RU. Lost Aussie rules. No Pro 14 or Champion / Challenge Cup. SKY seems to have no appetite for rugby union, but the UK and global appetite for rugby union in the is huge, particularly when we cannot get to watch live games.

Will we even get NRL this season?

I got SKY Sport predominately to watch Rugby, I really must re-consider, it certainly wasn't for football or  basketball / netball, niche sports or continuous re-runs of old Rugby League / Union or NFL matches. Rugby Union is one of the world's major sports with Britain at the fore-front and SKY now don't show any of it.

[Postie1]

I just read that the nz super rugby will be shown via RugbyPass, but this is a streaming service and the for tournament it'll cost £34.99. Another expenses on top of Sky, Bt Sport & Amazon Prime

I am wondering why I am paying all this money to sky every month when the main attraction was for the super rugby coverage 

One of the main issues over the super rugby coverage in the  uk is them not coming out and letting subscribers know they won't be covering the competition anymore. Sure the only reason for this is to try and stop people leaving when they find out.

Personally can't image there's much demand for dedicated channels for golf, nfl, F1 & cricket. Guess they must be cheaper than having a rugby channel with the tv rights for the Southern Hemisphere games.

Does this also mean sky won't be showing the rugby championship games between NZ, AUS, SA & Argentina?

[ukflyboy]

I'd also be very interested in this. I was just trying to decide whether to renew my Sky subscription for another 18 months with the Super Rugby and Rugby Championship being my primary draw card (as a born and bred Kiwi and ABs fan). If they don't have the Rugby Championship either then I'm definitely binning Sky! 

[graceland22]

Early last year I left Sky for BT TV and added Sky Sports so that I could cut my costs and maximise my rugby watching. The experience was dismal. The down-under recordings cut off before the end of the matches quite often and recording 2 matches at once was fraught with problems of pixellated recordings. I had  router and  TV boxes replaced. Upshot - I returned to Sky  with Sky Sports and added BT Sports and bit the bullet on costs.

At one point, I was without BT broadband for 5 days before I could get an engineer and was thus without tv also. Sky is a much better / more stable tv platform.

A downside is that you do not get the BT 'Extra' Sports channels on SKY so cannot record any Premiership RU matches shown simultaneously on BT. (Only watch half of the available screenings)

The down-under time difference is not an issue with recorder boxes, so the viewing figures should not drop overall.

Now I find that SKY has lost all interest in RU.

I now have to find a way to ditch SKY Sports and keep BT Sports without going back to BT TV (hopefully).

[GraeRus]

I've just seen reading the web page that sky isn't showing Southern Hemisphere rugby this year. That's a real shame was about to get Sky sports to watch it. Well won't be doing that the way it's going Sky sport won't have anything worth watching. Use to watch F1 but scrapped that too expensive for just one sport. Sky could halve the number of presenters and save us all a lot of money. 

[nolte]

[quote] It is ironic because The sponsor stuff shows SKY Aotearoa and they will be broadcast in NZ /Aus on SKY / Channel Nine. 
Thus one would have thought that SKY UK would therefore be able to get a favourable deal.

[/quote]

Sky UK and those other companies called sky are not connected parties so there would not be any "favourable" deal 

[TheFirstSword]

So to summarise, Sky is not showing any rugby union (the only proper rugby!) from the southern hemisphere at all (apart from repeats of old matches) and hardly any northern hemisphere rugby union. If you want to watch and Super Rugby AU or Aotearoa you need Rugbypass streaming at £34.99.

I want to watch South African rugby but I have to give that up as no one is showing that. There is the Rainbow cup starting up on the 17th April where SA teams will play against PRO14 teams and I’m not sure if that will be shown by anyone. Its even hard to watch Pro14 matches as it is!!

So I will be ending my SKY TV in the UK, its rather pointless for me as I can watch most things through Amazon Prime or Netflix and I have paid separately for MotoGP so don’t need BT.

Bye bye Sky.....

[TheFirstSword]

Update!

Premier sports are showing all Pro14 and Rainbow cup matches in the UK. Its a £10.99 add on to your SKY subcription or drop SKY entirely and pay £10.99 for online streaming.

[ukflyboy]

For the £80 a month Sky wanted me to pay for the next 18 months there's no way I'd be paying them MORE money to watch the stuff I want. I'm done with them. It used to be great when they had a monopoly on subscription TV, but now stuff is spread over a variety of different services but Sky think they can continue increasing the price for less content. Shame I'll miss the F1, but when there's a busy sports month I might just take a month of Now Sports. 

[Postie1]

I was wondering as this is a sky forum, do they actually read these threads and listen to the customers comments?

My next question re rugby coverage from sky is, will they be continuing the coverage of the 4 team Rugby Championship, the Currie cup from SA & the ITM/NPC  tournament from NZ later in the year, or have they terminated all coverage from the Southern Hemisphere 

The RugbyPass deal to show the super rugby Aotearoa unfortunately doesn't have any coverage of the Australia version, which is a pity, but guess that's because that's being streamed by StanTV as an add on to the standard package.

It would be nice for them to confirm either way.

[GraeRus]

Postie1 comments are interesting, I don't think they read these it's just something to show the listen to there subscribers. Also they've only got about a third of premiership football as BT have the rest and Amazon are getting in on the act too. Other than the six nations I've been watching Channel 5 highlights which are pretty good. Bearing in mind we all subscribe to Sky you'd think we should have some sort of voice as we pay for it, or at least contribute to it

[Mark39]

Sky's  Viewer Relations team are the people to contact with questions and comment on Sky programming.