Originally Posted by bottleofbest:
“I'm shocked at that. There again, Setanta was across all platforms. What did Setanta charge again? Was it £10?”
Originally Posted by derek500:
“Seems stunningly good figures for Setanta. Wonder if they're including the Virgin XL bundled customers?”
Pargraphs 2 and 3 of that Guradian article both contain errors:
Para 2: It was BT that had 833,000 Pay TV customers, not BT Sport (at that point). Some of those 833,000 won't get BT Sport. Indeed BT announced the 833,000 Pay TV number at the same time as the 500,000 BT Sport number.
Para 3; "BT had previously said that 500,000 customers of its total pay-TV base had signed up for its sports channels between 10 May and 25 July, with the majority being existing broadband customers". That quote is also wrong - some of the 500,000 were Sky customers with BT broadband so getting BT sport for free so not part of the BT "pay-TV base".
This journalism is a complete shambles.
Bearing in mind the above I would be very cautious about the comment re Setanta. Setanta were generally believed to have got 1.2m direct subscribers (ie excluding VM XL) at their peak but I don't recall seeing 1m after 4 months.
There are 1.8m VM XL homes so it can't refer to that - number will have risen but would have been well over 1m when Setanta started.