Following today’s news (29 April) that the UK’s BT Group is in talks on a deal regarding its sports division, with a view to potentially sell a stake or the entirety of the BT Sport division or consider a partnership or joint venture. The talks reportedly include media players like DAZN and Disney, tech hyperscaler & SVoD provider Amazon, and private equity funds.

Ben Luto, a Telecoms Market Data & Intelligence Analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his view:

“BT is a challenger in the UK pay-TV market as the third-biggest pay-TV operator with a 9.7% market share in 2020. In November 2019, the operator secured exclusive rights to the UEFA Champions League until 2024 as a part of its long-term growth strategy, centering on live sport, despite the substantial cost of the rights to such games. Another pillar of its pay-TV growth strategy is moving more towards content aggregation. BT hosts subscription video on demand (SVoD) platforms Amazon Prime Video and Netflix through its YouView platform. As well as this, in 2020, BT Group held the largest share of the UK’s IPTV subscriptions at over 40%, accounting for 1.8 million subscribers.”

“A deal with SVoD players such as Amazon and Disney could present an opportunity to reach a wider audience. With over 29 million SVoD video users in the UK by 2025 and 43 million expected by 2025, a joint venture/partnership could broaden BT Sport audience significantly.”

“The immaturity of the deal leaves the moves open to speculation as to whether BT Group intends to utilise a sale to generate investment, strengthen BT Sport or launch a partnership with the SVoD players to drive it towards new growth avenues.”