The Chain

On Friday morning, at silly o'clock (5.50am) I caught the last 10 minutes of  BBC Radio Five Live's "Wake up to money". This included a discussion on the profits that BSkyB were expected to announce later that morning. They correctly summised that this would be in the order of c£1 billion and that following the withdrawal of the News International takeover bid (Hackgate etc...) they didn't actually have anything on which to spend the profits. In fact the profit announcement included a share buy back of c£750 million which seems to underline the point!

Then at 7 am (at the same time as the profits were announced) Sky Sports revealed that from the 2012 season, they would be taking over the exclusive broadcasting of Formula One motor racing, in partnership with the BBC. The BBC will continue to show selected live races (including the British GP) and highlights of the ones of which they don't carry live coverage.

I have two areas of thought on this. Firstly the addition of F1 to the long list of sports that have moved from "free to air" broadcasting to "subscription" broadcasting brought about the usual "it's the end of the world" comments in the media (including Twitter). Comments along the lines of "I'm not paying to watch something that should be free" abounded. Well firstly you do pay, it's called the license fee. Furthermore, frankly the time for that argument was years ago, around the time that Test cricket was lost to the skies. Sky have an additional c£1 billion per annum of profit, over and above what they already spend on sports rights, that they could spend on sport so they can pick and choose what else they buy up and we have to accept that. If you're a Sports fan you have to have Sky Sports, it's as simple as that. Even if ESPN decided to extend their portfolio, I suspect that the platform used to watch it would still be Sky!

Secondly, then, how do the BBC come out of this deal? Quite well I think! BBC budgets are being cut (slashed?) across the Corporation. In the Sports department I guess that a long hard look at continuing with the F1 coverage had already been undertaken. Having worked so hard to win the coverage back from ITV and
to have done such a good job with the resultant production, losing it would have been a  potentially huge body blow. This deal is perfect for the BBC of the future. It keeps the "best bits" (i.e. the races that we would want to see) probably at 1 pm on a Sunday, to minimise the impact on scheduling. It enables the terrific investment in the "red button" and online proposition, which F1 has really benefited from, to continue as the end users remain. It accepts however that the days of a British "terrestrial" broadcaster being able to afford exclusive Sports rights is finally behind us. I don't therefore expect Six nations rugby to remain solely on the BBC beyond this contract.

After all the BBC did a similar deal earlier in the year on the Masters golf, when the whole tournament was on Sky, with the BBC just covering the last two rounds on it's multi-platforms. The golf fans that I work with seemed happy enough!