Deutsche Telekom to bid for Bundesliga rights
Reuters - Sunday 05 February 2012, 15:53
Deutsche Telekom
will bid on its own for exclusive satellite and cable
rights to show Germany's Bundesliga games live, a
magazine reported, opening a possible bidding war with Sky
Deutschland.
Should Telekom receive the rights, which are estimated to
cost about 225 million euros every year, Der
Spiegel reported on Sunday that it might look to sell the cable
rights to a third party.
A spokesman for Telekom, which currently owns only the
Bundesliga rights for Internet-TV, declined comment.
Telekom's head of Germany, Niek Jan van Damme told a German
newspaper in December that he was considering bidding for the
satellite rights as well, since about 115,000 customers that get
Telekom's Entertain TV over satellite cannot see games live.
The Deutsche Fussball Liga, or DFL, is set to announce on
Thursday how it will carve up the rights packages for four
seasons starting with 2013/14 during the upcoming auction.
Pay-TV broadcaster Sky Deutschland currently has more than three
million customers, but it needs the exclusive live rights to
Germany's premiere league to better compete with free-to-air
rivals including ProSiebenSat.1.
Roughly every second customer receives Sky content via
satellite, so a loss of the rights is a considerable risk for
the company.
Its share price plummeted 40 percent in one week alone after
losing out to UnityMedia subsidiary Arena in a December 2005
auction.
Vodafone, the world's largest mobile operator in
terms of revenue and the second-largest phone company in Germany
after Deutsche Telekom, is also mulling a bid for Bundesliga
football games on its own or with a partner, a spokesman for the
British group's German unit told Reuters.