Last weekend saw the curtain come down on the first year of the GAA’s exclusive rights deal with Sky Sports. Saturday’s football quarter-finals were the last matches of this year’s championship not available on terrestrial broadcast.

It was slightly surprising that more fuss wasn’t raised last week, as the quarter-finals approached, with live coverage behind a pay wall.

Maybe if the Dublin match had been more box-office, there would have been a commensurately louder protest, but the sense was that the gales of outrage had blown themselves out in the four months since the new media rights deal was announced.

On screen Sky acquitted itself competently, as was the expectation for such an experienced sports broadcaster. Production values were solid rather than spectacular and the new technology was quickly mastered and well presented.

Most of the pundits were veterans of TV3, but there was no harm in that, as it was production rather than punditry that had deteriorated under the previous rights holder.

It would have been unrealistic to expect a radical, root- and-branch overhaul of the coverage, given that Sky hasn’t exclusive rights to the entire GAA championship programme and couldn’t have been sure about numbers, despite its successful track record in many other sports.

Jumping into a traditional environment like Gaelic games, the audience for which has never had to engage widely with subscription broadcasters – even the national league matches on Setanta are freely available to many in areas where the station is included on the basic UPC cable package – was always going to have an element of the probationary.

Audiences have struggled, even if there have been mitigating factors, such as the non-inclusion of HD viewers – because Sky Sports 3 HD (high definition) doesn't sell ads into Ireland there's no need to measure the audience – which is understating the viewership.

About half of Sky subscribers in Britain have HD. Even if that figure is lower in Ireland, it’s not unreasonable to estimate that you’re still looking at a shortfall of around 40 per cent.

Must-see matches

Secondly, the Sky deal didn’t include many top or must-see matches. Aside from the weekend’s All-Ireland quarter-finals, the staple diet was qualifier matches on Saturday evenings, fixtures that can be even more randomly thrown together than provincial championship matches.

Even then they were unlucky when Clare and Wexford went to a replay, forcing them to take the less appealing Tipperary-Offaly hurling qualifier.

Interestingly, a week later the delayed Wexford-Waterford match delivered the biggest audience of the season, 60,000.

Applying the generally accepted multiplier of five, that would be a reasonable figure but the numbers at the other end of the scale haven’t been good.

One industry source put it succinctly: “Has the Sky deal meant the world has fallen in? No. Has it damaged the GAA? No. Has it been a major positive? No.”

One of the potential difficulties for Croke Park in all of this is concern for the future. It's an old concern and one frequently voiced by former director general Liam Mulvihill, for instance in his annual report in 2000.

“At the time of writing, a bidding process for national domestic television and radio rights to our games is coming to an end.

“All the indications are that there is no significant competition for the rights to our games or there is compliant agreement among the local broadcasters that no one will rock the boat.”

Paid less

This year

RTÉ

paid less for the same broadcasting package than it had in 2011-14. It is somewhat less valuable in that Sky have acquired simulcast rights to the later stages of the All-Ireland series, but neither broadcaster regarded that as of any great significance in Ireland.

(The figures from Sunday’s hurling semi-final would suggest they are correct. Although the multiplier for simulcast matches can go up as far as 12, the ratio at the weekend was around 43: fewer than 10,000 watched Limerick-Kilkenny on Sky Sports 3, whereas 434,000 tuned in on RTÉ 2.)

Sky’s main interest in the simulcast rights is that it is now able to hold exclusive access to All-Ireland semi-finals and finals in Britain, the market where the GAA was keenest to do business with the broadcaster.

A potential worry for the GAA at home though is that RTÉ may find itself in another effective monopoly situation.

The national broadcaster has paid less and the rights agreement deal created such a furore – to which RTÉ was of course a major contributor – and, it has to be acknowledged, genuine unease amongst the membership, that it’s inconceivable Sky might get any additions to its package in three years’ time.

It’s unlikely to be the case, however, as relations with TV3 aren’t thought to have been wholly ruptured by the manner in which they were unceremoniously dumped back in April and with UTV – an island-wide broadcaster – about to set up in Dublin there should be terrestrial alternatives.

Ironically, by pushing the price down, RTÉ has made it easier for competitors to get into the game.

Might Sky be put off by the viewing figures? It’s unlikely. The idea of looking for the rights came from the station’s Ireland operation, which recognised the importance of the GAA’s profile.

And given the billions that flow through the headquarters in London, there’ll hardly be any fretting over the figures until the deal has run a lot longer. smoran@irishtimes.com