From what I gather from comments posted on this forum in the past is that Sky's service was actually pretty poor and the number of games shown limited. The one thing it might have had was a good quality picture.
I think there is an understanding that quality may be sacrificed for the ability to watch whatever game(s) you like, but the issue of being able to access/replay the game in a limited time frame and how cutting out of the internet might prevent you from watching a game to the end is of more concern.
This whole offering doesn't come across as being "fully formed" yet - that's enough to put off a lot of people - I agree with your take on this.
I think you're being harsh on what sky offered. Yes, you couldn't watch every game live but you'd always get the big games, derbies, top of the table matches etc and a decent proportion of matches were live (which I think is the key for most fans, you want to watch SOME football every weekend - unless they've dropped the amount of games they show since I was last there in 2008 I never felt like there wasn't enough football on). There has been a dissatisfaction with Sky's football coverage in general but I've never felt there was a huge problem with their premier league offering (unless you were a fan of a smaller club who wasn't on TV a lot).
Great to be able to pick matches with this new service and it will be great for some people but for a lot of football fans they won't have the time or the inclination to watch more matches than they did previously. But all of this is based on it actually working! People are being asked to shell out a not insignificant amount in advance for 12 months of football - not $10 for the next month, see if you like it, cancel if you don't. They've got your money from day 1 and you're taking a leap of faith in their unproven technology. And it's not HD! That is absolutely the standard that people expect for their sports broadcast and it seems to me a major misstep not offering it.
But the biggest issue that I have with this is troubleshooting. People on this forum, by definition, are probably in the top 10-20% of computer literacy, all this stuff comes as second nature. That's not the same for the majority of users of this service. There are significantly more things that can go wrong here and generally they can be quite tricky to fix if you're not up with the play, I can think of:
- home wifi issues, router problems, drop outs
- ISP service issues including speeds etc
- PLP service issues
and I'm sure there are others. My experience with wifi is that it works absolutely fine the majority of the time but when it stuffs up it's absolutely unpredictable and extremely difficult to fix unless you are extremely computer literate. Most of the time the only solution is to unplug and let it reload again. These are all resolvable of course but it just is more of a hassle especially at 3am. Now we've all had the old Sky "rain fade" from time to time but these issues are another order of magnitude - I've had far far more drop out with my wifi than I've ever had with delivery via set top box. Of course these are not issues with PLP itself but they will be lumped in with it as problems with the service. If I was in NZ I'd get it because I still like watching games live and I think the club TV efforts will look quite amateurish vs regular presentation, but I certainly don't see the move to PLP as a trade up for your average viewer considering it costs more.