Auf dem Sports Media Summit soll Parm Sandhu laut einem Medienbericht gestern erklärt haben, wie es aus seiner Sicht zur Schaffung der Arena-Plattform und dem Bundesliga-Deal kam:
Sandhu said he wanted to include the Bundesliga rights as part of a triple play offer for both Unitymedia and Kabel Deutschland at a time when Deutsche Telekom had also expressed an interest in bidding. “Unfortunately, the DFL auctioned the Bundesliga in a way that we couldn’t bid for the cable rights alone. We had to bid for the complete rights; cable and satellite,” Sandhu told his audience. “We were never interested in the satellite rights! My intention was to give the satellite rights back to Premiere, and come to a wholesale deal with Kofler in cable”.
Having secured the rights, Sandhu offered a share both to Kofler and Kabel Deutschland, but both turned him down. This left the cable operator with little choice other than to launch the Arena pay-TV platform, which initially attracted more than one million subscribers in is first six months of operation.
Sandhu was unable to reach Kofler until a chance meeting at the World Cup led to a cross marketing agreement between Premiere and Arena, while Unitymedia became the one stop shop for internet, telephony, free, basic and pay-TV that Sandhu was trying to create.
However, the intervention of the Bundeskartellamt eventually resulted in Arena sublicensing the rights to Premiere, and Unitymedia becoming the pay-TV platform’s largest shareholder. “The Bundeskartellamt looks at every single infrastructure as a separate universe of its own, not as a part of an overall ecosystem or market. They are not so much interested in competition between the infrastructures. They look at every infrastructure as a separate market each with its own monopoly,” said Sandhu, adding that while an interesting theory for academic discussion, it showed the Bundeskartellamt to be out of touch with reality.
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