THE English Premier League (EPL), football’s wealthiest division, has long seemed like an ever-quickening fountain of riches. Between 2010 and 2017 the EPL’s annual income doubled to roughly £4.4bn ($6.2bn) according to Deloitte, a consultancy. The fastest growth in that period came from domestic broadcasting revenues for live matches, which almost trebled, from £594m a year to £1.71bn. This year’s auction for the right to show games on British television between 2019 and 2022 was expected to deliver yet another rise, thanks to an increase in games on sale from 168 to 200 and rumoured interest from online giants like Amazon and Facebook. Instead, the EPL revealed on February 13th that it had accepted underwhelming bids from its usual customers and held back some of its broadcasting packages, which reportedly failed to hit the reserve price—the first time that this has happened in the competition’s 26-year history.

So far the EPL has sold five of its seven packages of matches. Sky once again purchased four bundles, but has cut its yearly expenditure from £1.39bn for 126 games to £1.19bn for 128. BT has reduced its one-package commitment from 42 matches to 32, and its annual spending from £320m to £295m. That brings the total annual price to £1.49bn, about £220m below that of the previous deal. The EPL has created two extra packages of 20 matches each on midweek nights and bank holidays, which had previously been unavailable on British television. It had hoped that these would boost the overall value of the rights well above the previous record. After a disappointing first round of bidding, the EPL is unlikely to even reach parity with its previous deal, and may well face a 10% reduction in real terms.

Why has demand softened? The most obvious explanation is cord-cutting. Live sport has long been one of the main attractions for buying a subscription to cable television. Rupert Murdoch called the EPL his “battering ram” for putting Sky boxes into British homes, after the broadcaster bought the exclusive rights to the league when it launched in 1992. BT had hoped to gain similar traction when it purchased its first tranche of EPL games in 2012, and then became the sole British broadcaster of the Champions League, Europe’s premier knockout competition, in 2015.

But both networks have seen subscriptions drop since the last auction three years ago, according to Rob Wilson, a football finance expert from Sheffield Hallam University. Instead customers have flocked to cheaper on-demand services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. More than half of Britons aged 18 to 24 have streamed sports matches illegally, according to SMG Insight, a market-research firm. The habit has been encouraged by the television “blackout” of games on Saturday afternoons. This is supposed to protect attendances at lower-league games, but may also drive fans to seek grainy coverage of their teams online. The EPL and broadcasters are making increased efforts to fight this. Last year the High Court issued a blocking order to prevent people from watching matches illegally online, which requires British internet-service providers to stop users from accessing such websites.

Even for those who still have cable access, the rise of second screens has made viewers less engaged by advertisements, which has undermined broadcasters’ ability to supplement their subscription income with lucrative commercials. As Sky and BT have grown nervous about the risk of declining revenue, the erstwhile competitors seem to have reached an uneasy truce. Two months ago, BT declared that it was content to be a “strong number two” in the cable sports market. In December, the two broadcasters also struck a deal to carry each other's channels, thereby cooling the rivalry between them. Concerns about economic uncertainty after Brexit may also have discouraged the networks, according to Borja Garcia Garcia from Loughborough University: cable subscriptions will likely be among the first luxuries that consumers jettison if they feel a squeeze on their disposable incomes.

Equally troubling for the EPL was the dog that didn’t bark: the technology giants. Silicon Valley firms have begun to buy broadcasting rights in bulk. Amazon recently won the rights to show most of the men’s professional tennis tour in Britain, YouTube was a broadcast partner for the most recent baseball World Series and Facebook came close to winning the rights for cricket’s Indian Premier League. However, American tech firms did not show much enthusiasm for the EPL′s five main packages. And even though the simultaneous scheduling of the games in the last two packages, with four sets of ten matches kicking off at the same time, ought to be perfect for an online streaming service, the tech giants failed to meet the EPL’s reserve price for them in the auction.

The barriers to entry for such companies into the British broadcasting market remain considerable. The country’s shoddy broadband often makes it difficult to enjoy sport in high definition. Moreover, doubts remain about whether fans want to watch games on portable screens. According to SMG Insight, millennials still prefer old-fashioned TV screens, even if that means viewing delayed highlights rather than following an event live using a mobile device. Richard Amos from Ostmodern, a broadcasting consultancy, notes that fans already use social media to post frequently about matches, which suggests that the upside of screening them as well may be relatively limited. Nonetheless, Facebook has recently launched Watch, a hub for all of its streaming feeds, in America. Mr Wilson predicts that Silicon Valley companies will be a credible threat to Sky and BT whenever the next auction comes around. If so, the incumbents may need to improve their own clunky online services.