Virgin Media CEO Tom Mockridge said that Sky and BT's "jostling over the lucrative football deal has resulted in consumers paying more for less access to matches," according to Lauren Davidson of the London TELEGRAPH. Mockridge: "The rivalry for the exclusive rights to broadcast live Premier League football is an anathema to real markets: as competition for the rights has grown fiercer, the consumer has suffered, not gained. The facts speak for themselves; in the U.K. football fans are only able to watch less than half the games live on TV each season whereas in Germany, France, Spain and Italy, all live games are available and at a much lower price." Virgin Media asked Ofcom, the communications regulator, "to examine the way the blind auction for the Premier League live broadcasting rights is conducted." The Richard Branson-branded telecom, which was acquired by John Malone's Liberty Global in '13, has "called for a greater supply of matches at auction, bringing down the cost of each one, and has criticised the fact that matches are broadcasted exclusively on one network and none by free-to-air channels." Mockridge: "It's not just bad news for football fans, but by extension, to lovers of great British drama and comedy, too." A Deloitte report published earlier this month found that the soaring sums spent on sports broadcasting in the U.K. are "hollowing out" the creative side of TV programming and leading to a "worrying" decline in the amount of original content produced. The report said, "In essence, the rising spend in sports rights is increasingly crowding out spend on original UK programming" (TELEGRAPH, 9/27).
