Sky Italia provides sports subscription discount

Pay-television broadcaster Sky Italia has announced a discount offer to its sports subscribers in an effort to compensate for the lack of live action during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Running until the end of May, subscribers to both the Calcio and Sport packages will be able to apply for a discount of €15.20 ($16.50) per month. Subscribers to one of the packages can request a discount of €7.60 per month.

The offer is available to satellite and digital terrestrial subscribers.

Sky Italia’s prize rights property is Serie A, the top tier of domestic club football which it holds jointly with subscription OTT platform DAZN. The pair are in the penultimate season of their agreement with Lega Serie A.

Sky holds the rights to seven of the 10 weekly fixtures, with a total of 266 matches broadcast on its platforms per season. DAZN holds the rights to the remaining three matches giving it a total of 114 per season.

The deals with Sky and DAZN are worth €973m per season. Both deals are exclusive and platform neutral and run from 2018-19 to 2020-21. The Lega yesterday (Monday) said a resumption date for Serie A remains unclear.

Sky Italia’s sister broadcaster in the UK last month said it would allow residential and commercial customers to freeze their subscriptions amid the dearth of live sport on its schedules due to Covid-19.

The UK pay-television operator currently offers its ‘Complete Sports’ package to new subscribers for £23 (€26.04/$28.42) per month for the first 18 months (and then £30 per month).