Originally Posted by
Gray77
You're not wrong in terms of how many watch NFL or county cricket, but really the cricket channel was set up to cover the 2019 World Cup, England games and (they hoped) the Hundred which should have started last summer. Most of it is filler outside of an England winter tour or the summer months, but having the England contract is big for them as the test team is still a big deal to some extent.
The NFL gets mediocre ratings but the contract is for peanuts and it fills a huge amount of time because the NFL has its own 24/7 in-house network that Sky show during the week, and then five live games per weekend takes up 20-25 hours or more on the schedule. Given that the costs are next to nothing, the production, camera work, commentators etc are already provided by the US networks, all Sky had to do was pony up a bit of cash and they get wall to wall sport on one channel for six months a year with hardly any effort needed.
I don't for a second believe that Sky value the NFL more highly than RL, but they have enough content from the US to stick it on its own channel, whereas to have a dedicated RL channel would mean them having to do alot of their own work and making alot of their own shows from Mon-Thu outside of the live games, which as we've seen they've no desire to do. We used to have Boots N All and Backchat, both cheap as chips to make, both axed.