Quote:
Originally Posted by tvtimes
What makes you think that when only a handful of VM customers and BT customers take sky sports anyway?  |
You're not offering up any subscription figures for BT or Virgin so it's difficult for me to understand how big a handful really is. I know at the end of the last quarter Virgin reported 831,000 customers subscribe to SKY Premium channels. This of course includes both SKY Sports and SKY Movies. I think a safe bet would be to say anywhere between 400,000 to 500,000 people subscribe to SKY Sports via Virgin, based on the figures published, which is around 12% of all Virgin customers. If BT has a similar take up percentage wise then Virgin and BT could have around 550,000 SKY Sports subscribers in total. If SKY becomes the only place to watch all SKY Sports and BT Sports channels, that's 550,000 potentially unhappy sports fans on rival platforms that SKY can target. Even if 20% only moved to SKY that would be significant.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tvtimes
No, the whoesale forced price is coming to an end. Sky are still required to supply Sky sports. If they massively inflated the price Ofcom would just regulate it again.
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This article suggests SKY could hike prices to to make it no longer viable for BT to carry the channels. Competition lawyer Daniel Geey makes some interesting points in the article also including: ""Sky can, however, refuse to supply if they are unhappy with the offer the platforms propose."
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/media/ne...s-pricing.html
Quote:
Originally Posted by tvtimes
Where's the basis for these record rates you speak of? Not many bt or Virgin customers take sky sports. The people that are bothered are already with Sky and their tv uptake is stagnating.
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In Quarter 2 of 2010/2011 SKY had 10,150,000 TV customers. In Quarter 2 of 2012/2013 SKY had 10,742,000 customers. That's 592,000 customers over 9 Quarters of business meaning on average 65,777 additions each quarter. If SKY is the only place to watch all SKY Sports and BT Sports channels come the summer, with some customers on Virgins XL and VIP package already unhappy about the removal of ESPN, it's a very real possibility that SKy could welcome a volume of new customers that quarter at a rate never seen before.