Originally Posted by stej86:
“BT is so huge, they have the financial strength to completely wipe out Sky Sports. They if they so wish can afford to easily outbid Sky every time.
I think Sky will come to regret the day that they refused BT Sky Sports channels on a wholesale basis.”
This is what Sky will be worrying about now. They may say BT overpaid for the CL, and that may well be the case. But I see it as BT sending a statement to Sky, as well as winning the rights they wanted. If they've spent £900 million "just" on the Champions League, which is secondary in value of rights to the Premier League, what will they be prepared to spend at the next PL auction in a couple of years?
Some argue that BT have spent too much here, not leaving them enough for the PL auction, but I disagree. BT aren't stupid. They know there's an auction in a couple of years, and they won't just disregard that when deciding how much they were going to bid for UEFA rights. To me it's obvious that they calculated that they can still bid what they want for the PL while also spending the amount they did on European matches.
I imagine Sky will be very worried at the moment - I don't see them losing a huge number of games next auction, but they will certainly have to pay more to have a chance of keeping what they have. BT have the resources to outbid them at every auction if they wanted to, all it comes down to is whether BT value the rights in question as highly as Sky do, and who manages to put in the highest bid for something which is basically a game of chance (the auction).
As others have pointed out, this is hardly going to be good news for us having to pay for all these rights - BT may say their channels will be cheaper, but for how long? Especially if they win significantly better PL rights next time, how cheap will they be then?
This is good for BT, bad for us customers, and bad for Sky. The only time it *may* get better for football fans, if only for a couple of years, is if BT win majority rights to the PL and take a few years to raise their prices to Sky Sports levels. They may well put the price up by £20 a month straight away if they win the majority of rights, but I doubt very much that would be wise. Gradual increases would gain them more subscribers, and in that way we *may* end up paying slightly less for a couple of years - that is, depending on how much each customer values other sports apart from football.