(reg required) In UK, BSkyB (along with some News Corp papers) has bought the mobile rights to Premier League matches in the UK for “under £10m”. When combined with the £84.3 million it paid to get the online rights for 3 years the amount came out less than the £100 million for the combined rights paid for the current three-year license. The operators are now worried about how much they’ll have to pay Sky to license the content: “Under its original plan Sky had proposed showing games “off-portal”, meaning that to get them on to phones it would not have to involve the operators in setting up subscription services. The only revenues that the operators would have received were from the transmission of the signal over their network. But Sky is understood to have relaxed its attitude”. Five operators had teamed up to bid for the rights but the total was apparently less than that offered by Sky.
So what went wrong? Why has the perceived value of the highlights gone down? According to the Guardian: “Since the last set of rights was sold, a new generation of mobile data services, including news alerts and club-specific services, has sprung up, making exclusive access to highlights a less valuable commodity. SkySports News is even available as a streamed TV channel on some handsets.” This was forseen back in April... (via MobHappy)