Mark Daniels: Sky's the limit

The place was empty; nobody was interested. In the hours leading up to the game, most of the people who are big football fans expressed a total disinterest in the game altogether while people dining in the restaurant or taking part in the petanque tournament outside showed only a passing interest in the score. And so I felt justified in my three-year belief that Sky is just a waste of time in my pub.

Then, as England went on to show the Americans that they should stick to their grown-up version of Rounders, I remembered last week's game between Manchester and Chelsea. The bar was busy, the atmosphere was buzzing and people were enjoying the game. If it hadn't been for the village-wide power cut just as Terry was stepping up to take his penalty shot, it would have been a wonderful evening.

So the vicious circle starts again: should I install Sky? It's a question, however, to which I struggle to justify a positive answer. There's evidence aplenty to suggest people would come in to watch the bigger games, but not enough to suggest that they would come in and watch the smaller games. And, with Sky's exorbitant fees, they're the games you need people in to watch in order to make the service pay for itself - let alone profit from it.

It's no wonder, then, that so many landlords that I know have removed - or are in the process of removing - their Sky packages. Whilst town high street pubs can justify the cost, many village outlets like mine simply cannot. A quick poll of my customers showed that a small percentage of them would come to watch the minor games, so it should be no surprise that some landlords are taking a gamble and showing foreign feeds with prices more palatable to their businesses.

I don't condone any act of breaking the law, but I fail to see why so-called foreign satellite installations are actually illegal. And it all leads me to believe that Sky is missing a trick - especially with the smaller, rural establishments across our land.

Whilst a complicated algorithm that calculates the percentage between how many people can stand at the urinals over how many cars can fit in the car park might result in a gargantuan fixed monthly fee that is acceptable to a high street pub whose business is made up mainly of people who want to watch a mix of horse racing, golf and football, it doesn't work for all pubs.

But if Sky were to introduce a Pay-Per-View system for the commercial environment, that might be more interesting.

Let's say they let us have the box for a standard fee of £40 a month. This gives the landlord a digital box that works with his shiny widescreen television. They could even be generous and let us have a High-Def one. Then they charge a fixed-fee for each individual sporting event we want to show. This would mean that tonight, for example, I could decide whether it's really going to be worth my time showing the Republic of Ireland v Columbia match - or not, as the case may be.

As long as the PPV fees don't turn out to be an expensively complicated calculation of ullage over deep-fat fryer waste, this could be a far more attractive option for publicans than illegal feeds and court appearances.

And it would mean that Sky would get more installations back in to village pubs. Hypothetically speaking, it might mean they made even more money out of some of us in some months than they would under the current system.

But, in others, we might just pay the forty quid.