ESPN’s rights to the English and Scottish football content is set to be a core part of their new channel which by all reports is destined to be on the Sky platform. It is not known yet if the likes of Virgin Media, BT and Tiscali will be able to broadcast ESPN’s new channel in the near future.

The channel will launch on the 3rd of August and will almost certainly replace the ESPN America channel that is currently on Sky. Pricing for Sky Sports customers and non Sky Sports customerswill be £9 and £12 per month respectively.

Away from ESPN there are still loads of options out there so whether you’re a soccer pro or a soccer mum there is definitely a sports TV package that is suited to you.

Sport available free to air

Before paying for sport, it is worth reminding ourselves what is available free to air on Freeview.  The answer is not a lot more than you will get on BBC and ITV.  But there is a lot to choose from on the BBC and ITV this summer.  The BBC’s highlights include: the continuing Formula 1 season, the London Athletics Grand Prix, FINA World Swimming Championships and Rugby League action from the Super League.  ITV also have the England World Cup qualifiers (home games) which kick off again in September 2009.

The only additional sports channel on Freeview is Sky Sports News, though Freesat, the subscription-free satellite service offers BBC and ITV in high definition, so you can watch the Hungarian F1 for example in HD.

Free to air channels offer a small dose of sport on a limited budget but the serious sports fan will have to splash a little more cash to get the full range of sport this summer, especially if you want to watch live English Premier League and Scottish Premier League matches from your living room.

ESPN are the new kids on the English and Scottish football block. Let’s hope they stick around longer than these guys did.

For the serious sports fan - the cheapest way to get Sky Sports

Sky Sports includes 92 live Barclays Premier League games (with the season beginning again on 8th August), UEFA Champions League, Live International Cricket, Guinness Premiership Rugby, live NFL, Ryder Cup and PGA European Tour Golf.

Sky Sports’ summer highlights include: the Ashes, which is already underway, US Open Golf and the US PGA Championship in August, US Open tennis and of course the start of the Barclays Premier League.

The best value way of getting Sky Sports is buying as part of a digital TV, broadband and home phone bundle.  Sky, Virgin Media and Tiscali all offer Sky Sports as part of a “triple play” bundle.

Tiscali TV offer Sky Sports, as part of its TV, broadband and home phone bundle for £47.49 per month including line rental, but it does not come with high definition TV (HDTV).  In addition it has a £99 upfront cost.

Sky offers perhaps the value of all as it has the great advantage of a wide choice of channels in high definition including the Sky Sports channels.

Sky+HD (with HDTV channels), Sky Sports, up to 10 Mb/s Sky Broadband; and free evening and weekend calls with Sky Talk costs £50.25 per month, excluding line rental.  This includes the Sky HD subscription included within the price.  The upfront cost is £49.

Virgin Media offers a similar package for £45 per month excluding line rental. For this price you don’t get as many channels as Sky’s package and it doesn’t have Sky Sports in HD, but does have the attraction of up to 10 Mb/sec fibre-optic broadband with the option of upgrading to a much higher speed if need be. If you want more channels you can also upgrade your TV package to a larger size. Virgin Media have not yet confirmed if they will be retailing ESPN.

If you’re still looking for more packages to choose from then click the link below.

Grand slam of summer sports

So with the broadcasting rights drama having as many twists and turns as the actual season it’s easy to see how the everyday sports fan can get confused. If you are not sure which route to take, you can speak to our impartial experts on 0800 1388 388 or click here to compare thousands of deals in a matter of seconds.

Written by Chris

Carphone Warehouse’s offer to buy Tiscali’s UK broadband, digital TV and home phone business has been given the formal go-ahead by the European regulators. The European Commission said yesterday that the transaction would not damage competition.

Carphone will become the UK’s second largest broadband provider (after BT) with approximately 4.3m customers spread between TalkTalk, AOL Broadband and now Tiscali.  They agreed to pay £236m ($388m) for the UK assets of Tiscali, the Italian telecoms company.

This deal should be good news for existing Tiscali customers, many of whom have complained about the poor levels of customer service.  This has been partly due to a lack of investment in customer service infrastructure as a result of Tiscali’s poor financial situation. But now Tiscali is to join TalkTalk we suspect that customer service will improve significantly. 

Tiscali is likely to remain as a standalone brand for the foreseeable future, but may then get folded into the TalkTalk umbrella brand. 

Tiscali also brings with it Tiscali TV, a small but interesting IPTV business, which presents TalkTalk with a great opportunity to add content distribution to their broadband business. 

This is a path currently being actively pursued by Virgin Media who recently announced a content deal with Universal Music to offer a digital music service which enables Virgin Media broadband customers to both stream and download as many music tracks and albums as they want from Universal Music’s entire catalogue, in return for a monthly subscription fee.

If you need deciding between broadband providers, we can help you to compare broadband providers’ prices and package features. Our experts are available free on 0800 1 388 388 or at www.simplifydigital.co.uk

Written by Charlie

Carphone Warehouse has today announced that they have successfully acquired the TV, broadband and home phone provider Tiscali.

The deal, worth £236m, will propel Carphone’s TalkTalk brand into becoming Britain’s largest consumer broadband provider with 4.25 million customers, covering over 25% of UK households.

What will come as a huge relief to worried Tiscali customers is the fact that their services will remain uninterrupted during the closing stages of the acquisition deal and beyond. There will be no new forms to sign and your Tiscali email address will stay the same!

What will change is the fact that this will make Sky and Virgin start looking over their shoulders…

Up until now, TalkTalk have only offered a two tier attack on the market – Broadband and home phone. With the purchase of Tiscali, TalkTalk not only obtain their customer base but they also obtain their infrastructure, which includes digital TV.

Sky and Virgin Media are the major players in the market place if you are looking for a triple bundle but, with the aggressive nature of TalkTalks broadband and home phone offerings, one can only assume that they will attack the profitable digital TV market in the same manner.

Tiscali has (finally) been sold.

As we are always saying here at Simplifydigital, there are major savings to be made by bundling your services so, if you’re an existing customer of TalkTalk for broadband and phone and they were to offer a digital TV service down the line, it would make total sense to take up all three services with them.

The only facet that would be holding TalkTalk back from launching a ‘digital TV’ attack on both Sky and Virgin Media is the fact that their digital TV service would be offered through an ADSL infrastructure (your phone line). Sky, who supplies their service through a satellite dish and Virgin Media, who offer theirs through fibre optic cable, can offer more TV channels and also offer HD content, which, according to the latest HD customer sign up figures, is in demand more than ever.

All of this means that  there will be more competition in the market which will only drive better deals so, this isn’t just a major coup for Carphone Warehouse it’s also a great result for the end consumer, whether you belong to Tiscali or not.

Written by Chris

Tiscali has long been looking for a buyer for its UK broadband operations.  They have approximately 1.7m broadband subscribers in the UK, with the result that a host of potential buyers expressed an interest including Sky, Vodafone, and Carphone Warehouse.

Carphone and Vodafone appeared to drop out of the process last year, unimpressed with the £500m valuation that Tiscali was seeking.  This left only Sky in the running, but negotiations collapsed recently and there was genuine concern that Tiscali may not find a buyer and even slip into administration.   

Indeed Tiscali shares were suspended from the Italian stock exchange earlier this month after it warned that it will not be able to meet interest payments as it had been planning to use the proceeds from the sale to pay down its £558m debt.

But there are reports today that Carphone may be back in the running, clearly hoping to drive down the asking price at the 11^th hour.  And there are even rumours that Sky may also rejoin the bidding process.

This is good news for Tiscali’s broadband, home phone and digital TV customers who were faced with an uncertain future. 

Written by Charlie

The UK regulator Ofcom ruled today that it will “present no regulatory barriers” to the development of an ul super-fast broadband infrastructure in the UK.

“Our message today is clear: there are no regulatory barriers in the way of investment in super-fast broadband,” said Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards. “We want to promote investment but also ensure that there is fair and effective competition for the future.”

In a statement, Ofcom said that “Recent announcements of investment and planned investment, including Virgin Media’s launch of a 50Mbps service, are very positive for consumers. Consumers will benefit even more from increased choice and wider availability.”

The ruling allows BT to go ahead with an investment of £1.5bn in a fibre-optic network, which in theory will give nearly 20 million UK homes access to 40-60 Mb/s super-fast broadband via a FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) service – and an ultra-fast FTTH (fibre to the home) service capable of delivering speeds over 100 Mb/s available to a further 1m homes.

BT had made clear it only wanted to make the investment if Ofcom allowed a fair return and this now seems feasible following the Ofcom decision. So BT is understandably very pleased with the outcome. 

BT chief executive Ian Livingston said “Today’s announcement gives us the green light to push ahead with our 1.5 billion pounds superfast broadband investment plans to reach at least 40 percent of UK households by 2012″

So it’s good news for UK households in the long term, though all the UK DSL players currently providing unbundled broadband services (such as Sky, TalkTalk, Tiscali, O2 etc) have a lot of strategic thinking to do.  DSL is in real danger of becoming a semi-redundant technology within 4 years and they need to understand how they will gain access to the fibre-optic broadband future.

Virgin Media has no such concerns and has a clear run at the ultra-fast broadband market following the launch of their 50 Mb/sec FTTC service earlier this year.

Written by Chris

The latest research from Point Topic shows that there has been a big slowdown in broadband contracts sold in the last quarter of last year – in fact sales more than halved in the period, versus the same period the year before. 

Point Topic blame the sharp fall - with only about 200,000 new broadband connections in the period – to the economic slowdown. This is echoed by comments from the service providers themselves, who cite the huge reduction in home movers as a key reason for a reduction in sales of broadband contracts. 

As a result Point Topic estimate that the number of broadband lines in the UK increased from 17.04 million in the third quarter of 2008 to 17.23 million by the end of the last quarter 2008.

When you think that there are only approximately 25m homes in the UK – this does represent very high penetration – and indeed part of the slowdown will be simply as a result of the maturity of the market.

Point Topic commented:

“Within that total it looks as if BT and its resellers are suffering most. The ISPs using local loop unbundling to provide their broadband services to Carphone Warehouse, Sky, Tiscali and Orange did relatively well, adding nearly 430,000 lines between them. Point Topic estimates that Virgin Media may have added about 60,000 cable modem customers as well.”

This makes absolute sense as the BT resellers have very little to offer the consumer relative to the LLU providers, whose economics allow them to offer far more appealing price propositions. So what we are seeing is a shift in share towards the big LLU players. Indeed indications are that Sky and O2 were the biggest selling broadband services over the time period.

If you would like more information on which broadband package is right for you, why not call one of our digital experts on 0800 1388 388 or use our unique Smartsearch tool.

Written by Chris

Simplifydigital’s latest research of 2,000 online respondents shows that broadband subscribers in the UK are paying an average of £16.50 per month and broadband and home phone bundle subscribers are paying an average of £26 per month (including line rental) for their services. This is way more than the best value broadband deals that are currently available in the UK.

This in part reflects the proportion of people on premium super fast broadband packages, but more directly reflects the proportion of people on expensive legacy broadband deals.

The best value broadband and home phone deals currently start from around £15 per month (including line rental) for 8 Mb/s services with very good usage caps – compare deals on Simplifydigital from TalkTalk and Tiscali for example.

These broadband and home phone deals deliver annual savings of over £130 versus the average that people are currently paying in the UK.  

The cost of not shopping around for your home services can really stack up

 

So there are big savings for those of us who are prepared to take the plunge and switch providers! But the research shows that, despite paying more for legacy broadband deals, many have not got round to switching broadband providers.

Indeed 45% of UK broadband customers have been with the same broadband provider for 2 years or more, with 15% of customers being with the same broadband provider for 5 years or more! 

So our advice is check what your paying a month for your broadband and home phone services and if it’s more than £15 per month (including line rental) – shop around, because you’re mad not to!

Written by lee

It has been widely reported this week that Sky has backed out of exclusive sales negotiations for Tiscali’s UK broadband business. This follows Carphone Warehouse’s apparent exit from the auction process a few weeks back on the basis of price and the challenges associated with integrating Tiscali’s disparate customer operations. 

The report in the Guardian this week notes that Sky and Tiscali’s Italian parent were unable to agree on price, with Tiscali looking for a price of around £600m and Sky looking to pay closer to £450m. 

The deal would immediately have made Sky Britain’s third-largest broadband provider as Sky currently have over 1.8m customers, and Tiscali have 1.77m UK customers.

Crucially, despite very attractive pricing and heavy promotion, Tiscali are losing customers in the UK.  Their high customer churn has meant that their subscriber numbers actually declined in the last quarter by nearly 40,000 subscribers.   This coupled with the deteriorating economic climate and slumping company valuations, makes Sky’s decision to apparently back out of the negotiations understandable.

But despite these issues, if Sky believe that there is strategic logic in the deal, they may well be playing a longer game.  With a notable absence of competing buyers, Sky may well be walking away, to let Tiscali stew in its own juice for a few further weeks, before returning to negotiations next year. 

One thing that seems clear is that the longer a potential buyer waits, the better terms they are likely to dictate. So don’t count Sky out of the hunt for Tiscali just yet.

Written by Chris