On Soccer:These days he's the joint chief executive of Setanta Sports but Mickey O'Rourke's entrepreneurial skills got their first run out when he was entertainments officer for UCD Students' Union a little over two decades ago. I was around the place at the time and remember well a bustling year that yielded a fair few good late nights but more losses than profits for his employers.
Things have changed quite a bit since then for the 42-year-old and in London yesterday the company he and his friend, Leonard Ryan, initially established with a view to charging Irish emigrants to watch games on big screens, paid to bring journalists from all over Britain and Ireland to the launch of its English Premiership coverage.
The point of it all was that last year the company secured rights to two of the five three-year packages put up for sale by the Premier League with winning bids totalling some €579 million. The sum is dwarfed by the €1.9 billion paid by Sky for the other three packages, but then what Setanta have purchased is effectively the right to show the third and fourth most attractive game each weekend in secondary time slots through the season. For that, at first glance rather dubious privilege, they have shelled out around €4.2 million per game.
The idea, however, is that a lot of their 46 matches (a 3pm game every Saturday of the campaign will bring the figure available to audiences in the Republic to 79) will feature top-four teams, though generally not playing against each other. Access to their channels will cost between €10 and €18 per month here, depending on who brings the service into your home, or £10 in Britain and O'Rourke said yesterday that the aim is to add one million subscriptions on the back of the deal.
It's a business where things move quickly but the numbers are still phenomenal for a company established from scratch 17 years ago by two ex-pat football supporters desperate to watch Ireland's World Cup game against The Netherlands while living in London. British terrestrial TV was understandably preoccupied with the group's other game, England versus Egypt, but the pair reckoned BBC Northern Ireland would have the rights to the Republic's match and phoned up to see what might be done.
They got, O'Rourke recalls, "a really nice guy," (Jim McMullen, who now works for them) on the line who talked them through the rather convoluted process of obtaining the many and varied clearances required to show the game at a venue in London.
They then made the calls, many of which involved a good deal of bluffing, and eventually received the go-ahead. The pair then had two days to sell tickets for the match, which was to be screened at the Top Hat in Ealing.
"It was before mobile phones but there were a lot of Irish here at the time," he says, "the bongo drums kept beating and people turned up. When it was all over it sort of dawned on us that we might have the germ of a business idea on our hands here somewhere."
Their big break followed not long afterwards when Channel Four ended its coverage of Gaelic Games in favour of Italian football. O'Rourke and Ryan stepped in and started beaming the games to pubs. Suddenly their venture had a foundation on which to build. And build they did. Setanta now operates a dozen or so channels accessible in a couple of dozen countries. Those channels employ some 350 people with perhaps another 500 working on sales and customer service in a Scottish call centre.
There have been, admits O'Rourke, times when "we weren't quite sure we were going to make it but in the end we've been lucky when it mattered and here we are today." Their strokes of good fortune have included buying the ITV Digital's production suite from the collapsed company's receivers in an e-bay style internet auction for a third of what it would have cost new. The cameras in its Dublin studios came from a travel company who had taken a short-lived and ill-conceived excursion into promotional programming.
Then there is NASN, the American sports channel established to target that country's ex-pats with content largely bought up in its early days from an indifferent ESPN. When the American giant woke up last year to the opportunity it had missed, it purchased the station from Setanta now marketed in Britain and Ireland. Paying more than €75 million for live rights to the SPL a few years back looked a considerable gamble and many commentators there predicted the little known Irish company wouldn't make it to the end of the contract.
Since then, though, the recruitment of key industry figures from rivals, major rights acquisitions in golf, rugby and football and the investment of hundreds of millions of pounds by the financial institutions who now own a majority of the company's equity have transformed the perception of the firm in Britain.
"The Irish thing is set up for us at this stage," remarks Tim Twomey, the company's football editor, "if we can't succeed there then we're in big trouble. The UK, though, is a more developed market and a tougher proposition."
It is tough, in no small part, because of Sky's dominance which Setanta aim to challenge over the next few years. Their rivals have thus far taken a rather benign view of the competition and are believed to have favoured Setanta's bids for the smaller packages on the basis that they represented less of a threat than, say, NTL.
Since then, however, Setanta's portfolio has grown and the Irish company has broadened its strategy to include Freeview which gives it the potential to reach significantly more British homes than its rival. As the Premiership marketing drive cranks up it is already in 2.5 million British homes.
Respective revenues, though, barely merit comparison at this stage and Setanta's real test, O'Rourke and the rest of the company's management know, will start when Rupert Murdoch's fiercely competitive outfit start to regard the Dubliners as genuine rivals. A day that may not be so far off now.
