Sport is a major driver of business and community in Ireland and nowhere are the bonds more closely tied than in the world of TV and Broadband.
Yesterday’s story about the BT Sport victory in a bidding war for UK rights to show the Champions’ League has raised the intriguing possibility around Sport for Business of whether this, together with the ongoing battle around European Rugby could make BT a serious suitor of Eircom.
BT Sport is shown free to BT Broadband subscribers in Britain and Northern Ireland but not in the Republic. Here it is part of a package sold by Setanta alongside their other sports content.
Sport is clearly seen as the main engine for growth at BT. It cuts across broadband, TV, data and social media, four pillars of how any communications company is thinking and planning for the present as well as the future.
In September of this year Eircom became the first operator in Ireland to offer a ‘Quad Play’ bundle of services across broadband, subscription TV, mobile and fixed line. eVision is the TV side and it currently shows third party content from RTE. That was the BT model until it expanded by creating its own content through BT Sport.
BT is already a major player in Ireland with a substantial presence in Belfast and Dublin. It looks on Ireland as a single market but currently is unable to fully execute its model in the South.
Ireland’s adoption of subscription TV is 30% ahead of that in the UK. This is part of the reason why Sky have committed such resource to being in Dublin with a staff of 1,000. Lessons learned in the Irish market can be translated into massive gains elsewhere.
Eircom is currently the only communications company with headline sponsorship of the GAA through the All Ireland Football Championship.
While the current round of negotiations around broadcast rights are unlikely to see great change in terms of the mix between free to air on RTE and TV3 and pay per view through Setanta, this is a fast moving world and the next round in 2016 will see a very different landscape of how people are consuming sport.
If the future of European Rugby emerges to be on BT Sport as opposed to Sky, the imperative to ‘tidy up’ broadcasting to fans of Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connacht will become more pressing again.
As a business Eircom has turned a major corner. Revenues are up over the two most recent quarters. Lat year it turned down a bid of €2 Billion from Hutchinson Whampoa, the owners of 3 who instead went and bought the Irish operations of O2.
Eircom management is charged with a sale of the business. It could well be that sport is a key component in finding common ground with a cash rich and ambitious company that knows Ireland, and that could be in the market to expand its audience.
Could it be that those ads for BT Sport as ‘Coming Soon’ that ran throughout the summer could be dusted down and repackaged for an Irish market in the coming months?
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