According to The Rugby Paper,the 6 nations will go to Sky in a £300 million deal with BBC and ITV told they cannot combine again.
If this is true I am not happy. I understand the need to generate revenue but it will be at the expense se of the sport dropping out of the general public's consciousness. Just need to look at Formula 1 as an example.

Formula 1 has dropped out of the public's interest because it is plain boring.

Cricket sold its soul to SKY and the game declined dramatically while those running it kept the money to fill their troughs. It will be no different for rugby.

The 6 nations isn’t protected sadly. From memory, ITV and BBC did a joint bid for the last rights package in which the vowel countries home games are on ITV and the consonant countries home games are on BBC. Apparently it has been made clear that the joint bid won’t be allowed this time.

Aside from the limits to access that putting it on pay tv provides I really don’t want to have to listen to Barnes any more than I have to. I actually think I’d rather listen to Jiffy - numbers, suuuurrrraaaaleee a peeennallteee tryyy to Wayyyyullls etc.

According to Brian Moore this morning CVC owns 80% of Sky Bet so no doubt that is one reason why.

Moore has now tweeted a correction: Sky & CVC no longer own Sky Bet.

9 quid a day on Now Tv sports day pass. Per day.

The price of a few beers at the pub, let alone transport getting there.

Agreed, it is a risk, but as we see, the game needs investment. Hopefully, the money will be reinvested into the game. CVC need to make a profit, but the game needs the money too.

MM: I cant prove one way or another that Cricket "sold its soul" to Sky - seems somewhat hyperbolic to me - but the game has not declined dramatically, especially in this country. Roughly 10,000 fans went to Galle/Sri Lanka 15 months ago - how many English Rugby fans went to England Rugby's last tour to Argentina or how many plan to go to Japan this summer? Nowhere near that many. Cricket is alive and kicking, especially County T20 and international cricket of any type (i.e. the cricket that Sky generally supports/offers).

More generally: before worshipping at the alter of CVC, ask F1 fans what they did to their sport:-

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2018/sep/10/cvc-ownership-f1-warning-premiership-rugby-union
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/formula-1/2016/03/26/cvc-approaches-10-years-as-f1-owners-but-few-in-mood-to-celebrat/
https://www.racefans.net/2016/09/08/f1-changed-cvc-era-liberty-mean/

Can't argue that the sport needs more support, but I'm not convinced that CVC will be the knight in shining armour - more like the night CVC ran off with all the money.

The reason I say cricket sold it's soul in this country at least is due to the fact that the ECB took SKY's money and took international cricket away from terrestrial TV resulting in our national summer sport being unavailable to thousands of potential young players. This is compounded by the fact that the ECB make millions from Test and one-day international cricket using the counties players and the counties grounds (with the exception of Lord's which is owned by the MCC) but give a pittance back to the counties themselves which has now resulted in the County Championship the sport's flagship competition being sidelined to basically a spring and autumn competition so that summer cricket can consist of increasingly ridiculous short forms of the game (like the ludicrous Hundred) in order to make the money that the counties should have been given in the first place.

Not that it annoys me as you can no doubt tell!

Perhaps that's part of the problem already. Didn't the last round of sponsorship bids for the 6N bring in far less money from the Burnt Malt Stout drink than it had previously received from the bank now known as NatWest?
Maybe the attempt to get more money from TV is a result of some of the sums not adding up with the already reduced sponsorship.
I agree with the general point about smaller audience, smaller sponsorship though.