B/T to 'take-on' Sky T/V. Sports ?

[Leekbrookgull]

Many newpapers are reporting that B/T aims to take-on/challenge Sky on it,s T/V sports packages and sell them at a much lower cost (news story on BBC News website) out of interest are B/T 'big enough' to damage Sky ?

 

[Springal]

Who are B/T ?

 

[jordanseagull]

I think it'd be good if B.T did this.


But yeah, who are B/T? And what is a T/V?

 

[Leekbrookgull]

Serious,are B/T big enough to take-on Sky ?

 

[TomTom85]

Well....BT are listed at number 16 on the FTSE 100 against BskyB at 21. I don't think that they would try and beat Sky at satalite broadcasting, they would never win. BT are in the unique postion that they own 90% of the telephone lines in the UK. So i think they will stream live football straight to the TV an exstention of the BT vision package. it's very cost effective for them. It just about winning the rights. A big outlay, a big risk. just look at Satanta.

 

[Springal]

BT are MASSIVE, you do not realise how big they are, they do so much more than just phone lines and internet. For alot of manafacturers they are the biggest distributors in the UK [IBM, HP, Cisco.] You can pretty much buy anything from them [well as a business] and they even arranged alot of the stuff for our office, TV's, desks, fridges through various arms of the company, so if I thought they could do it yes they could, not sure what would be in it for them though? A load of value adds to DSL subscribers I guess

 

[Leekbrookgull]

TomTom,what i find a little odd is why B/T,s right to charge you line rental has never been challenged ? I am with Tiscali and i have not paid line rental for over two years,they phoned me up and offered me a deal a one off payment around £30 and no further line charge. They have kept their word.

 

[clapham_gull]

Somewhat missed the point of the story. What SKY are being forced to do is lower the price at which they sell their own channels to other providers. In other words Sky Sports 1 may possibly become cheaper on Virgin for instance. As a reaction to that, Sky may well drop own prices.

What is probably needed is for Sky to broken up, split the platform from the Sky channels or for the Premiership to be forced to go alone and sell their channels to Sky, Virgin etc. rather than signing exclusive deals.

 

[LowKarate]

TomTom,what i find a little odd is why B/T,s right to charge you line rental has never been challenged ? I am with Tiscali and i have not paid line rental for over two years,they phoned me up and offered me a deal a one off payment around £30 and no further line charge. They have kept their word.

In answer to your earlier question, yes BT are big enough (100,000+ employees and as mentioned above, it has a bigger market capital value than Sky).

The question you ask here about charging is actually the result of regulation. BT's pricing until very recently (i.e. 2-3 months ago) has been subject to controls put in place by Ofcom, which meant that BT could not 'bundle' voice and broadband products in a single price for both services, whereas other Communications Providers like Tiscali were allowed to charge a single price and effectively not have a 'line rental' charge.

When it comes down to it though, not all of the product retail prices are what they seem. You might think you are not paying for something, but the cost of that service may well be loaded into the other product for which you are paying.