BT take Sky to the cleaners
Well technically the Premier League did, but obviously BT ran the bill up for them.
They knew Sky were desperate to hold onto as much of the football as possible, and they made them pay heavily for it :nod::nod:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31410300
Quote:
Sky's shares are trading more than 3% down after it agreed to pay £4.1bn to show live Premier League football between 2016 and 2019.
Sky won five of the seven TV packages on offer, but paid 83% more than it did in the last auction three years ago.
However, shares in BT rose more than 2.5% after it paid £960m for two of the TV packages, 30% more than last time.
Analysts at Jeffries said the outcome had been "sobering" for Sky, but "reassuring" for BT.
Sky and BT paid a combined £5.136bn for the live TV rights deal - far in excess of what had been expected.
Jefferies said the deal would be "challenging to explain" to Sky shareholders.
"For Sky, a sobering result," Jefferies said. "Even with some claw back on costs/pricing, we expect [analyst] forecasts to move lower," it said.
The price Sky paid per year was about £330m more than City analysts had predicted.
Jeffries estimated that Sky would try to claw back about £200m a year through cost-cutting and £100m through incremental price rises.
Sky will have to be pretty careful now, Sky Sports is already ridiculously expensive and if you increase the prices of other packages too much to compensate you'll just drive customers away.
I wonder if Sky will be back for another round next time, or ceed some of the rights to prevent another pasting??
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/image...e_tvincome.jpg