In reply to a post by JohnR:

As well as virgin.

I get the whole lot of sky & Bt for far less via virgin, which includes far faster internet.

Is that most of the Sky satellite channels received via the Internet?

Sky and BT Sport have wholesale agreements with Virgin for carriage of the channels over the cable TV infrastructure

So not received the Internet by the usual definitions e.g. a Sky Sports Pass on NOW TV

Thank you for the clarification.

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

Thank you for the clarification.

As the saying goes '' Every day is a School Day ''

reducing churn means nothing if it loses you money.

BT is not a new early start company where customer growth comes above profits, its an established company with decades of history, so investing in expensive football rights and then losing money from it is not a success, what is particularly nasty about it is that its a very short term strategy, the rights are only purchased for 3 years in advance, BT gain no long term assets from the investment.

Also I wouldnt consider it to have a proven net gain on churn either, the football rights is one of the primary reasons I left BT, as not long after the rights were acquired they started sharp price rises on their other products to subsidise it and I decided I didnt want to subsidise their sports customers and so left for another provider.

Edited by Chrysalis (Tue 19-Jun-18 11:40:13)

you know you can offer football without buying rights directly right? you can resell sky sports. Thats what virgin media do.

Sky are struggling to make it work.

The last deal is worth less per game, and overall as well. Sky have been raising prices on their products way above inflation to subsidise the lower profit per sports customer problem they have, and one of the reasons sky are branching out into other things is they are losing confidence in football as a long term profit driver for them.

There is also clear differences between BT and sky.

Sky have been known for football since 1992, and people still see sky now as the place to go for football, they air more games and they now have the rights to all the first picks, e.g. manchester derby, it be on sky, the leics city EPL title win, all of our last 9 games and spurs last 9 games were live on sky, BT got none of them.
In terms of internet infrastructure, sky have unbundled exchanges, brought the easynet network. So own a internet core. But compared to what BT have which is a fully meshed nationwide network, they own the local loop in most of the country, wholesale provider for most isp's and even lease out connectivity to competitors like sky. The two companies are in different places and have different core sources of revenue so the importance of EPL rights on either company I feel isnt comparable.

We will know in 3 years if the EPL rights is decided to be a wrong path for BT, when the next rights come up for auction, for now they committed for another few years as an auction has just ended.

Sky appear to mirror my thoughts by offering punters football and being very reluctant to offer higher speed broadband.

BT of course are a smaller company than SKY but they appear to be doing alright in broadband customer numbers despite the negative 'insight' offered on the thread.