Brit Forum: Should HBO Have A UK Station?

yes...

 

sky just buy the rights to the fights , the very basic then stick their own show and commentary on.

Gotta be real, HBO arent gonna show a lot of live shows here and take all the risk considering a small select few will wait till 5 am to watch it and they could never advertise nor cater to the UK audience as well nor charge ppv, UK tv requires support of their boxers etc etc

Access directly to the US network even with a dish is not possible from Europe.

Best thing and cheapest is to watch HBO shows the only way possible which is usually free, then get a motorized 1.2 m dish and good hd sat box with recordered etc etc

With this dish setup you may not get sky but you will bet over 10 000 channels and find that sports wise you can get a hell of a lot of fights!! If your good with software apparently there is a premium world there for all for **** all too.

Also for example the haye Valuev fight was PPV in UK however free in Germany, you can sit at home in the UK and watch that for free with no bills whatsoever from German RTL,

You may need to spend £700 bucks to setup but thats it this is all legal and legitimate, a year of sky costs about that I think thats without PPVs

 

HBO don't currently own/purchase the UK rights to any fights though. I don't really see what the difference would be from what we already have, other than one other competitor in the market. But the market doesn't show any signs of actually supporting that. On the downside, you would then have another subscription that you would have to pay for to watch them.

No reason why Sky or ESPN can't buy the UK rights to any of the fights that HBO currently show in the US. Equally HBO would have to buy those rights if a hypothetical UK arm wanted to show those same fights. If Sky and ESPN don't consider some of those fights worth buying, why would we assume automatically that UKHBO would?

 

Amen, have wrote them 3 times about this now.

 

Sign me up !

 

Would be ace

 

been waiting a week after getting banned to shut this down.

1) HBO dont own the rights to the fights, the promoter does
2) HBO is mostly films and tv shows, sky already has the market wrapped up for films
3) If boxing isnt a hot with other UK tv stations, why would it be on UK HBO
4) If they did they would put up a UK commentary team
5) MAX KELLERMAN!!!!! LARRY MERCHANT!!!!
6) Boxing works for HBO is the US because its world class fights at prime time. UK has to make do with domestic fights at 10pm and world class fights at 5am
6) HBO costs $50 a month and you still have to pay for the biggest fights $50 a pop on top. Like Sky but more of a rip off.
7) Sky show most of ther big fights anyway.

 

if the price was reasonalbe then yes. but it wouldnt be.

 

HBO UK would be absolutely quality!!

But they make a lot of money on selling specific shows like Sopranos, The Office,True blood etc to UK broadcasters, if they show these programmes on a HBO UK channels, this 'easy income' would probably dry up, though I spose they could make it back in other ways, that may be considered an uneccersary risk though!

However id love to see HBO and specifically HBO boxing on UK tv!

 

long shot but id love it

 

Some very good points here. Obviously there is a big difference between HBO launching a channel over here and them showing their fights over here, which has escaped some but thankfully not others. Rob, cobbler and doyle sum this up perfectly on this page alone.

The likes of David Haye have shown that big boxing fights make money at a sensible time of the night, and really only Ricky Hatton and the occasional superfight has made big money at 5am in the morning. The thing that puts off all broadcasters (apart from setanta) is that it's a hell of a lot cheaper to show teleshopping or just go off air at that time of the morning than to buy the rights for boxing that only attracts the hardcore mob at that time.

It's a shame, but the time difference really is a killer. I know its a hypothetical question, but a lot of the people here that have said stuff like "sign me up now" are presuming that they would automatically show the boxing they do in the states, when a potential HBO UK would be a completely different entity to HBO in the US, the same as ESPN here is different to the states and Sky here is not the same as Sky Italia or Deutschland-they just all end up under the same umbrella.

 

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