Pay TV phase three document - Stakeholders - Ofcom

Pay TV phase three document – non-confidential version
� FTA TV broadcasts the Challenge Cup (of which the final is listed).
4.112 Tennis is considered important by 20% 122 of subscribers who watch sport at least
once a week 123 . Those subscribers consider at least one of US, French or Australian
Opens important. However, there is only a small amount of tennis on Sky Sports 1:
14 hours of the US Open. Our research indicated that the French, US and Australian
Opens were considered important to about 20% of subscribers. The majority of
tennis programming shown by Sky is shown on Sky Sports 2 and Xtra.
4.113 The following tennis can be found on other channels:
� Sky Sports 2, 3 and Xtra show coverage of the WTA Tour, the ATP tour, the
Davis Cup, the US Open and the Masters Cup.
� FTA channels exclusively broadcast Wimbledon (of which the finals are listed),
and the Stella Artois tournament, and non-exclusively broadcast Davis Cup and a
small number of French and Australian Open matches.
� Eurosport broadcasts WTA Tour Tennis, US Open, ATP tennis, the French and
Australian Open and the ATP Tennis tour.
4.114 The above assessment shows that for each of the six main sports shown on Sky
Sports 1, there is a range of potential substitutes both on other pay channels and on
FTA channels. The assessment of likely substitutes for Sky Sports 1 as a channel is
complicated because Sky Sports 1 is a bundle of content. This presents two issues:
� Although football is highly valued by a significant majority of subscribers, tastes
for other sports are heterogeneous. Different consumers will value different
elements of the bundle and therefore consider different products as substitutes.
� Most consumers have preferences for more than one sport. Therefore consumers
would switch to the bundle which best reflects their preferences for multiple
sports.
4.115 A critical part of this assessment is the fact that subscribers tend to value two or
more sports. As noted above in Figure 12, 33% of subscribers to Sky Sports 1 only
value football. Less than 1% of subscribers only value one of either cricket, rugby
union or golf. Almost half (47%) of subscribers who watch sport at least once a week
value football plus at least one other sport. To determine whether other channels are
a substitute for Sky Sports 1, we therefore need to assess whether those other
channels can provide sufficient quantities of multiple sports, including, but not
necessarily limited to football.
4.116 [ � ].
4.117 [ � ] Figure 14.
122
Ofcom Sports conjoint research, See Annex 10 of Ofcom’s September 2008 for details .Wimbledon
is important to about 32% of subscribers.
123 [ � ]. See Appendix 3 of Annex 6 for details.
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