UK telecommunications company BT will “significantly undercut” the pricing of pub subscriptions to pay-television broadcaster BSkyB, according to the Financial Times.
The report said that Sky’s pub and club subscriptions generate turnover of between £200 million (€234.8 million/$305.6 million) and £300 million each year, and Sky has already offered some large pub groups discounts of up to 30 per cent on their previous subscriptions.
BT is planning to use Sky’s existing pay-television platform to show its new sports service in pubs, but the telecommunications company has not agreed a carriage deal with Sky yet. BT will also partly subsidise satellite-television dishes and boxes for pubs and clubs that do not already have the technology to receive Sky, the report added.
Bruce Cuthbert, director for commercial customers at BT Sport, said that the service would be “substantially cheaper” than Sky subscriptions.
In other news, BT has said that it expects to broadcast European club rugby union games from the 2014-15 season, regardless of the direction European rugby stakeholders settle on for the future of their showpiece competition.
In September, BT announced that it had acquired the rights for English top-tier Premiership teams’ matches in a “dazzling new European tournament” that would succeed the Heineken Cup, in a three-year deal from 2014-15 to 2016-17. However, the agreement had not been approved by Heineken Cup organiser European Rugby Cup, which announced an extension of a deal for the existing tournament with Sky for the same three-year period.
“Our view is that heading into 2014-15 we want to be part of that (European) competition, whatever that competition becomes,” Grant Best, senior channel executive producer for BT, told the Guardian. “We did a deal for what we thought would involve that tournament.”