@Gareth21212 wrote:
Recently purchased sky glass and had a follow up call from them checking everything was OK, and they told me that you won't need a btsport subscription, that discovery plus app on tv will include the premier league games etc at no extra cost
The £600m per season they need to pay to UEFA and the Premier League for their two biggest contracts dictate that the price for the TNT Sports would need to be at least £25 extra per month. Realistically, even that price is nowhere near enough to make the service self sufficient. If they go lower than that, you will be reading things in the trade press because of unhappy shareholders... they're the ones who would feel it through their dividends and we can safely say that the shareholders aren't in the charitable sector.
The above is very conservative, with 2m people each paying for a full calendar year - they'd manage to cover the rights fees but pay for nothing else out of the subscription income alone.
WBD would be needing over 7m paid customers to their £6.99 tier to simply cover the UCL and PL costs, which cost around £50m per calendar month. They would need to hope that their remaining rights could be broadcast for free because their current strict financial conditions wouldn't be able to throw money at them from across the wider business.
The number of BT Sport subscribers is unclear but it wouldn't be too wide of the mark to gauge it at 1.5m. Even at the current £29.99 monthly pass price, it's not hard to see why BT shareholders wanted to rid themselves of the sport burden - many of whom never wanted to get into in the first place.
Sky are only able to offer their own sports channels at a reduced price because they can offset the cost against other areas of the business. WBD don't have that luxury and realistically, the only company that could offer the football at anywhere near the price people are wishing for is Amazon et al.
