In the anger, panic and depression of the last 50 pages, as Denyo says there hasn't been much analysis on why this deal might have fell through. If we look deep enough the answer is probably already there.
Look at how BT dealt with Sky. We know they wanted to handle to transaction themselves. We know their business plan is solely based around getting broadband customers. The guardian article last week (
link) wasn't really analysed to see how they might behave with Virgin Media. It says that only 23,000 people took up new Pay-tv offers and the majority of sign-ups are existing customers. In the region of 477,000 people are not paying for the channel.
So doesn't this mean that BT are just not interested in the £12-£15 per month subscribers? It'll only bring in £4m per year to them and that's peanuts. Clearly then, they don't care what price VM are going to offer whether its £3 x 1m XL customers or even £20 per month standalone. They can afford to pass up £30m-£40m per year because they are not targetting television customers. That's where they are different to ESPN and Setanta who needed that revenue to support their venture. VM actually had all the cards in those negotiations. This time its BT with all the cards. BT also mustn't care about the potential advertising revenue loss if VM viewers don't have the channel.
So what's the stumbling block? BT want to deal with the customers themselves, we know that. They've shown that they are not interested in volume of subscriptions they just want broadband customers.
So have they told VM that they can have the channel as long as they control the subscriptions? In other words, they could offer the channel to VM at £2 per month as long as they get the customer names and details of who signs up. Would VM be happy to supply them with the details of possibly 1m customers? Its probably business suicide to do so.
We cable customers are potential gold-dust to BT, we'd all be targets for Infinity, telephone and tv and while BT is not something I'd consider there will be plenty of biters out there if the offer was good enough.
I'm not saying I have the answer, but it doesn't look as if the battle is over money. This is a battle for control and a much, much bigger prize than £2/£3/£12/£15 per month poxy television packages.
