Do they really care about viewing figures though? Surely it's about driving subscriptions and keeping them.
True, but it's quicker to copy and paste from ITV Media than to work out those figures! Sky never release their separate sport subscription figures though the latest figures I find suggest 10.4m subscribers overall.
So Sky need to be making £1.6bn a year from subscribers just to cover the cost of this deal (before any production costs etc.), so based on 10m subscribers overall that is £160 from each of them a year. At a very rough guesstimate on the basis of nothing of half of Sky's subscribers subscribing to Sky Sports that is £320 each, or nearly £27 a month.
Guess the real figure though is the increase - to cover the deal they need to an extra £1.9bn from subscribers over three years, so around £650m a year, or £65 per subscriber. I can't see the Sky Sports subscription going up by over £5 a month so most of that will filter through.
BT paying just over £70m more a year so based on 7m broadband subscribers that'll be an increase of £10 a year to cover it, though of course there may be the switch to charging for BT Sport once the Champions League kicks in. I don't think they've got enough here though to back that up as worth it though.
Would be interesting to know what the losing bids were - I wouldn't be surprised at all if the second round is just greedy tricks by the Premier League to panic Sky into paying more.
