BT Sport scores own goal with £897m Champions League footie rights deal

Re: Can I opt out?

Plusnet (owned by BT) is cheaper, but doesn't come with BT Sport. That is your deduction for unsubscribing.

Blame Sky then - they were the ones that started all this pay pay pay for TV, so they get subscriptions AND have adverts to grab even more.

BTSport is not mandatory on the Sky platform. If you don't want to pay BT, don't.

Just keep supporting the utterly pure and respectable Murdoch organisation, you know, the one that paid £336m corporation tax on its £6.4bn income....

Re: To be Fair

Good points, I think you are correct with a complete split prediction.

BT has always wanted to be a Broadcaster, seem to remember it was Maggie Thatcher that banned BT from broadcasting to allow the cable companies to recover their investment in laying cable, that worked well.

As noted by others almost 10% cut off the value of Sky stock today :-)

BT will also broadcast some of the games free, which is more than Sky ever does, Sky have needed some competition for sometime, lets hope BT can do it, I was a happy customer of BT with BT Vision though sports is of little interest to me it is a massive win for BT, this is how Sky got such a hold on pay tv by bidding high for the premier league or was it First division football rights.

I personally would have preferred if they had invested 1.5 billion into production of some decent content, that would mean drama, comedy and TV like we used to have, rather than line the pockets of over paid footballers. But compared to football fans I am very much in the minority.

Re: To be Fair

Actually the two boxes are because pre V5 versions of the Home Hub do not handle VDSL, whereas the HH5 does, installations with pre V5 have to use a separate modem. For office politics it was decided that Openreach would supply modem where required.

Re: BBC

One will happen. The other will not.

Do you need to guess which?

Re: BBC

God help us if that day ever comes. The quality of TV has nosedived since the advent of Sky with the BBC having to go downmarket as well to keep up it's ratings (imagine the hoo-ha over the licence fee if the BBC was not still regularly topping the ratings). If the BBC were to go then 24/7/365 X-factor/Big Brother/Get me out of here, etc ..............

Re: A little more serious than it might appear

Football 'vanishing overnight' is not something I would classify as serious.

Re: Will I be able...

BT Sport is delivered over Freeview.

I hear ya, but

I'm not a big fan of the Murdoch monopoly BUT... the constant federation of sports rights is in no way beneficial for the consumer.

If someone happens to be a big football fan they now have to buy a service from Sky, BT, ESPN possibly just to watch their team play.

Surely it would make more sense just to sell job lot to one vendor every year, at least then we'd have time to switch if needs be.

The only people who benefit from the 'competition' are they rights holders as they get silly auctions where idiots from BT burn money on content formerly the paid for by adverts. (in the champions league bit)

Last time I was in the US ESPN seemed to have mountains of channels with each one having a particular sport on, so presumably you could subscribe to certain sports or sport bundles.

With these kind of auctions I can only see the price to the end consumer going up in the long run as the costs have to be recovered so the net result (pardon the pun) will be sports viewing gets more expensive in the long run regardless of the model.

grrr

Re: Simple answer...

I guess this has to be viewed as an attempt to shore up their broadband customers rather than making the money back through subscriptions as that would be impossible, so if BT is targeting 5% growth in subscriptions that may cover a good proportion of the cost. Its funny how after 30 odd years of deregulation people now associate competition with price rises as so often all we've done is move from a benevolent monopoly to a malevolent one.