The revolution of TV rights for football has gone almost silently in the national press and also the revenge of the telephone companies on the television stations that the coup carried out by British Telecom at the expense of BskyB is foreshadowing.
With a real coup on the wing, BT bought the TV rights to the Champions League and Europa League for 897 million pounds (a little over a billion euros) for three seasons, starting from 2015-6. BT paid about double what Bskyb and ITV had previously spent to win the rights but it has strengthened its ambitions in sports-themed channels and above all has paved the way for a real revolution.
As Marco Bellinazzo shrewdly observed in the Sole 24 Ore newspaper "Bt can afford to buy TV rights at very high prices because it mainly aims to sell telephone subscriptions and broadband Internet including sports programmes", thus increasing its turnover and its profits and displacing a pure TV operator who cannot lower the price of his subscriptions beyond a certain level.
Sky had already undergone a challenge of this kind in Germany by Deutsche Telekom and who knows whether, as Berlusconi is now on the path to political decline, such a game may not open up in Italy in the future too. Much to the relief of sportsmen and TV viewers.
