The Cricketer reports that counties met recently to discuss the future of live streaming. It reports:
"One of the takeaways from the meeting of the counties – attended by the majority, but not all – with general consensus that it isn't feasible, at a time where finances are limited at several counties, to not be trying to make money from a summer-long streaming service that can essentially operate as a digital season ticket. That is particularly the case where the product is a bells-and-whistles, multi-camera operation, often expensive to run and, in some situations, good enough to be carried by Sky Sports.
While the monetisation of streams is seen as a necessary inevitability in the not-too-distant future, in whatever form that takes, some counties feel more comfortable than others about the use of a paywall because of the money that has gone into production values. At other grounds, where the crux of the coverage might be little more than a couple of static cameras, that might not be the case.
There are also those who are reluctant to put their product behind a paywall for the reason that keeping their product free to view acts as a marketing tool to encourage in-person attendance at matches and retains a connection between fans and the team, while paywalling also brings questions around the use of match-clips on social media."

I can see the logic of the clubs wanting a revenue stream from the streaming. They need to establish if live free streaming has increased in person attendance. However going behind a paywall might end up having a negative effect as happened after the 2005 Ashes series when the ECB thought they could cash in.
An alternative worthy of consideration would be to sell advertising which I feel could be more profitable than charging a viewing fee.

The risk is if enough people will pay to cover the costs, and to provide an advert free stream' People will be a lot less tolerant of adverts if they are paying for the stream content.

One, possible, solution would be to make the stream only available to registered users, so you have to register, at no charge to use the stream. This would have the massive advantage of effectively blocking the numerous posts in the youtube chat from people whos main interest is gambling not cricket.

Another advantage of registering would give the clubs the opportunity to send promotional emails. My post regarding adverts was for having adverts to enable the service to remain free to view.

Did it not start like that for most streams, people had to sign up to access it?
Then it moved to YouTube for ease, primarily due to away fans.
But if it meant not having to pay, I’d rather sign up to 9 other counties streams and have them have my email and details, so they can claim greater revenue from advertising.

Think what most counties need to remember is that if they’re making people pay, for most counties the quality needs to be higher than it is currently.
At the moment, if the commentary is rubbish, the camera angle is poor, the picture is grainy, the sound is out of sync or the feed drops out, most people think “it’s free what do you expect”. But if you’re paying for it, that attitude changes, and there’ll be expectations that cost money.

I think Kent charge already and made £5k or so in 2023. If that was for a full year I'd think leaving it free would be better than charging. And getting people to register might well help. Also if the figures for the value of the Hundred are correct the Warwickshire board will be hard at work devising a distribution to long suffering members rather than thinking of new charges.

Is that revenue or profit for Kent Reabank? I guess overall it's a market. I've watched a lot on YouTube recently and I would pay for it. But not much (as Kent kind of shows) . I think Somerset have had massive numbers now and again so I thinknthe market is there, just that it's a market who won't pay that much when most of the games are work days. An integrated product that does more stuff might be a go-er.

Is that revenue or profit for Kent Reabank? I guess overall it's a market. I've watched a lot on YouTube recently and I would pay for it. But not much (as Kent kind of shows) . I think Somerset have had massive numbers now and again so I thinknthe market is there, just that it's a market who won't pay that much when most of the games are work days. An integrated product that does more stuff might be a go-er.

Reabank wrote:

I think Kent charge already and made £5k or so in 2023. If that was for a full year I'd think leaving it free would be better than charging. And getting people to register might well help. Also if the figures for the value of the Hundred are correct the Warwickshire board will be hard at work devising a distribution to long suffering members rather than thinking of new charges.

Love to know what the figures are for the hundred!!!! My thoughts are that the membership cost should be reformatted to be based on the number of matches to be watched Something I understand Lancs do and the streaming for all should also be thrown free in with that. Free streaming as a come on in some format should also be in place to also attract new members

I'm surprised the streaming stayed free for this long to be honest. It's obviously not the same as going to the game but for many counties it's almost as good as watching a televised game.

I suggested on a different thread that the way to go might be a centralised streaming platform where you can access streams from all the different counties from the same place. If setup and marketed correctly, that could be quite an effective way of advertising the county game. In fact, with a bit of vision, you could imagine having some sort of live programme for a Blast round or a Championship round, where they switch between different games depending on what's going on - something a bit like the BBC live text page but with live footage. Of course, as others have pointed out, the difficulty is that some counties put a lot more effort into their streaming than others. To be fair, I think the average quality has gone up quite a lot over the last couple of seasons. At least if you just had to pay for one centralised service that would mitigate that problem a little bit if you also had access to all the other games. Of course, figuring out a revenue sharing model for such a service could be difficult.

Exiled Bear - it's all very well you applying common sense and a bit of imagination to the problem, so long as you don't expect the ECB to do the same.

GerryShedd wrote:

Exiled Bear - it's all very well you applying common sense and a bit of imagination to the problem, so long as you don't expect the ECB to do the same.

My services are available for a very reasonable rate!!

GerryShedd wrote:

Exiled Bear - it's all very well you applying common sense and a bit of imagination to the problem, so long as you don't expect the ECB to do the same.

I am getting worried about EB - elsewhere he questioned why the One Day game could not carry on until 8pm when the game has been affected by rain.

I hope those at the ECB do not read this forum - they won't be able to cope.

LeicesterExile wrote:

GerryShedd wrote:

Exiled Bear - it's all very well you applying common sense and a bit of imagination to the problem, so long as you don't expect the ECB to do the same.

I am getting worried about EB - elsewhere he questioned why the One Day game could not carry on until 8pm when the game has been affected by rain.

I hope those at the ECB do not read this forum - they won't be able to cope.

Sorry, I’ll stop now!!

I would hope that whatever they come up with that it will be free for members (at least for home games). Could be marketed as an additional membership “perk”

I have to say that the CC live stream (or 'live rain' as the girlfriend calls it) has been one of the best things to happen to red ball County Cricket in the last few years. I always have the stream on a spare monitor at work, and wouldn't mind production values which don't go beyond two static cameras. I wouldn't mind ads at the end of every other over. I grew up watching matches 'live' on CEEFAX so this is a massive improvement.