BT Sport TV Grabs Ashes Cricket from Sky and Related Tournaments

The battle over who controls the rights to premium live TV sports content in the United Kingdom has continued today after BT announced that they had outbid Sky (Sky Broadband) to secure the exclusive broadcast rights for the Ashes series in Australia from 2016 to 2021.

On top of that BTSport will also show all Australian Test Matches, One Day Internationals and T20 Internationals played in Australia. Multiple series against world leading nations such as New Zealand, South Africa, India and Pakistan will also be broadcast on BT Sport.

The rights also include 35 KFC Big Bash League matches, as well as the women’s Ashes and the women’s T20 Big Bash League. BT is believed to have paid around £16 million per year for the deal and outbid Sky as the previous rights holder.

Delia Bushell, Managing Director of BT TV and BT Sport, said:

“BT Sport is delighted to be adding international cricket to its line-up, and to be the new home of the next Ashes tour in Australia. We will show live domestic games featuring the best players in the world during the Big Bash League and all Australian home matches for the next five years.”

On the downside this deal means that more consumers will feel compelled to either swap providers or to take out two subscriptions in order to view all of the content, which means that watching sport on TV has become an increasingly expensive prospect.

But the real goal could be the next rights sale from the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB), which is currently held by Sky until 2019. Needless to say that the ECB will be hoping that competition between the two media and telecoms giants could produce an additional windfall.

At present it’s not clear whether the new content will be available to those who take the FREE (with BT Broadband) BTSport Lite service or the BTSport Pack add-on that costs an extra £5 per month for existing broadband subscribers (free for those who take BT Broadband and BT TV). We suspect the latter.