Starhub interested in Premier League

StarHub is interested in acquiring non-exclusive rights for English Premier League football as long as it can break even on the investment, according to the pay-television broadcaster’s chief executive Neil Montefiore.

Rival pay-television operator SingTel is understood to have agreed a deal with the league for the non-exclusive rights in the new rights cycle, 2013-14 to 2015-16. Montefiore said that StarHub had not started talks with the league yet, as SingTel is still in an “exclusive negotiating period” with the league after acquiring non-exclusive rights for three seasons.

“We’d want to pay for it so we could sell it to our customers at a price that would at least break even for us, but also at a price that they could afford to pay and want to pay,” Montefiore said, according to Singaporean newspaper Today.

“We don’t know what the prices they [the league] are talking about are yet,” Montefiore added.

Cross-carriage regulation, introduced by the Singaporean government to cool rights prices after the last round of Premier League deals, and the apparent withdrawal by StarHub from the sports-rights market recently led many observers to predict a massive drop in income for the league. The cross carriage regulation requires SingTel and StarHub to share content acquired on an exclusive basis.