Colchester chairman statement re ifollow

https://www.cu-fc.com/news/2020/september/club-statement/

Interesting about the money from the first 500 going to the home team. Rightly or wrongly I think this puts Town in quite a good position compared to others. So long as fans are buying the legal stream.

Given how important revenue is currently, surely the club in conjunction with the telegraph and or other media outlets and platforms, could run a story and/or campaign complete with instructions on how, to muster up as many fans as possible taking up passes for our games.

Sorry if i've missed this somewhere, but we do have any idea how many passes have been sold for our games so far?

Quoted from psgmariner

https://www.cu-fc.com/news/2020/september/club-statement/

Interesting about the money from the first 500 going to the home team. Rightly or wrongly I think this puts Town in quite a good position compared to others. So long as fans are buying the legal stream.

Some interesting things in there.

I'd have thought a percentage of the away bought passes going to the away team would be more fair than the first 500. But I suppose most teams won't have more than 500 viewers anyway. How does this work with things like Salford doing it a different way?

They started selling season tickets much later than us. Shows how it's not just us that's struggling to keep up with the changing environment.

Their fans seem to have taken a lot more refunds than ours. How much did we refund? It does seem like our fans were a lot better than most other clubs in this regard.

So how does this work with teams like Salford who are not on iFollow and show games at £5 on YouTube?


For instance last Saturday we get all the revenue from home iFollow, but if Salford sold 1000 on their YouTube chanel do we get anything or do they keep the lot?
When we go to Salford do we keep all the iFollow money as they are not on it?

Quite a few of the IPTV dodgy servers have been blocked by ISP's this weekend as well so that should push more people to paying their £10's.

I’ve worked out that I’ll be spending far more on iFollow than I would on two season tickets (1 adult, 1 child). I can’t be the only one. And given that Gove has just confirmed that a return to grounds isn’t going to happen anytime soon, this is going to be a season of financial survival, nothing more. I’m pretty sure that leagues one and two will be a bloodbath and unrecognisable next year.

I was going to start a thread on this subject.

If anyone from the club is reading this, then i would like to make a suggestion that you get your act together with regard to the ifollow streams. I don't know who is ultimately responsible for the output, but every game brings new issues, and apologies from all quarters. It's not good enough and you are losing out on valuable income.

Myself and others would gladly pay the match pass fee for games if the quality wasn't so hit and miss. It has been said by more than one person i have spoken to that they have found great difficulty getting a stable, quality stream, and when they do, there are other issues around the commentary. Given that you can get a top quality 24 hour sport pass for Sky, that gives all sport channels on multiple devices for the price of £9.99, you have some serious competition.

If the service becomes stable and easy to access, you could recoup a lot of the match day income you are currently losing. At the moment, it is just not worth a tenner and there are plenty of people saying the same.

Quoted from ginnywings

I was going to start a thread on this subject.

If anyone from the club is reading this, then i would like to make a suggestion that you get your act together with regard to the ifollow streams. I don't know who is ultimately responsible for the output, but every game brings new issues, and apologies from all quarters. It's not good enough and you are losing out on valuable income.

Myself and others would gladly pay the match pass fee for games if the quality wasn't so hit and miss. It has been said by more than one person i have spoken to that they have found great difficulty getting a stable, quality stream, and when they do, there are other issues around the commentary. Given that you can get a top quality 24 hour sport pass for Sky, that gives all sport channels on multiple devices for the price of £9.99, you have some serious competition.

If the service becomes stable and easy to access, you could recoup a lot of the match day income you are currently losing. At the moment, it is just not worth a tenner and there are plenty of people saying the same.

I know a lot of people are saying this, so there must be something to it, but I've watched the last 3 matches on a 32 inch tv with near HD quality, no buffering issues, just the audio issue that was on the radio too. It has been like this for every match over the last couple of seasons.

Maybe my connection is better, or something else is going on, but for me, the quality is very good

It's too hit and miss for too many people.

I watched the game on Saturday, hard wired from my router and it was fine until about the 70 minute mark and then it buffered a few times.  Audio was fine but pictures paused and had to be manually paused and restarted.  It's not a major issue, but it is enough to put people off.

Let's completely take the fact that it's a tenner in the clubs pocket out the equation.  In any single form of comparison it's not great value.  You're paying £10 for 90 minutes entertainment that's basically one camera angle, commentary that's ported over from the local BBC radio station and little else.  You compare that to, as previously mentioned, what you can get for a tenner with Sky/BT etc.  even compare it to Amazon Prime or Netflix.  Prime probably the better comparison as they do live sport now.

The clubs need to collectively lobby iFollow to make the service better, it's that simple.  This quite simply is their income stream for the immediate future.  They can't afford to offer a substandard service.