[Dave42]

Originally Posted by ocav

As I mentioned in a DS forum post, Sky make a loss on Atlantic excluding new subscriptions. If you base it on Ad Revenue/Rights alone, the viewing figures are too low. By being available on VM they have a guaranteed amount of money coming in each month. Most of their recent subscriptions in the last 1/2 months are probably for those wanting BT Sport, the buzz around Atlantic has died down a little.

If sky operated Atlantic and they didn't have any other channels and they didn't own a platform and it was getting the current amount of viewers it would crash and fall. The last few years the subscription uptake has helped fund that and I'm sure the guaranteed income from Virgin of probably keep it afloat.

If we said SD and HD came with SD at 25p per customer and HD at 30p per customer (baring in mind VM is now around £3 better off per customer a month at the moment)

4 million M+ to XL recieve SD = £1 million
1.8 million XL recieve HD = £540,000

So virgin pay Sky £1.5 million a month for Atlantic, if I was Sky I'd probably shake on that, it's equivalent to 77,000 basic Sky subscriptions without any additional cost. Especially now the hype for it has died down.

And before you say where would they get the money, Virgin used to pay ESPN (based on £3 per XL customer has quoted previously) £5.5 million (without any non-XL subs), so they have the more than enough money going spare.

Now TV is great but can you expect 154,000 people signing up? That what they would need to get the same amount of money as XL, plus they have additional costs involved in hosting the streams (they already host them with sky go, but the additional bandwidth required).

yes I have used that argument about SA in past that they make much more money but sky don't seem bothered about that there using it to try get people to get sky and I don't think they have changed there stance on SA