[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by 1andrew1

Economics. The cost of broadcasting on satellite or cable are fixed regardless of the number of viewers. LGI has far fewer potential MUTV subscribers than Sky. I calculate LGI to have a potential 84,000 and Sky 700,000.

Here's the calculations:

Sky UK & Ireland has 10.6m TV customers.
VM UK has 3.8m and UPC Ireland fewer than 400,000 TV customers but let's generously call the total LGI customers 4.2m.

So already, Sky has 2.5 times more customers than LGI.
However, Sky's customers are overwhelmingly sports fans - two-thirds take Sky Sports (7m) whilst only 20% of LGI's (840,000) take Sky Sports. These people are far more likely to subscribe to MUTV than non-Sky Sports subscribers. If we assume that a generous one in ten Sky Sports subscribers will also subscribe to MUTV then we get to the above figures.

---------- Post added at 10:20 ---------- Previous post was at 10:15 ----------

Originally Posted by DaMac

Also for a company that has a big presence in Ireland like liberty global they should know that a disproportionate amount of people subscribe to mutv compared to say Chelsea tv.

I guess it all depends on "big presence".
If we take there to be 388,000 UPC Ireland subscribers of which 20% have Sky Sports, that gives us a figure of 77,600. If we assume that one in ten of these will subscribe to MUTV we get a figure of 7,760 subscribers. How much would you pay UPC Ireland for the privilege of broadcasting in HD if you were MUTV?