"Italy is the weak link and Germany is the big opportunity," said Roddy Davidson, an analyst at Westhouse Securities in London. "It's not going to be plain sailing but a main plus is it's going to give Sky more buying power when it comes to sports rights and the extent to which they'll be used across the market."
Sky Europe
Sky Europe, as the combination is known in the industry, will be the continent's biggest pay-TV provider with 20 million customers in five countries, including Ireland and Austria. That compares with Comcast's 22 million and AT&T's 20 million broadband customers in the US, according to London- based Enders Analysis.
With 11 million subscribers, BSkyB - 39 per cent owned by Murdoch's 21st Century Fox - is by far the senior partner. It also brings deep pockets, spending about 2.6 billion pounds a year making original TV programs, acquiring rights to Hollywood films and airing exclusive sports events including English Premier League soccer matches.
Sky Deutschland is much smaller, with only 3.7 million customers, though it is the fastest growing of the three Skys and operates in a less saturated market where only a quarter of people have pay-TV, compared with half in Britain, according to British researcher Ovum.
"Sky Europe provides opportunity for growth in markets where pay-TV take-up is low," said Claudio Aspesi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.
Improving the fortunes of Sky Italia appears to be the greatest challenge for the new company as the country's TV industry struggles with recession and a sharp decline in advertising revenue. In the fiscal year to June, Sky Italia reported sales of 2.9 billion euros and 4.7 million subscribers, but made a net loss of 8 million euros.
Competitors
By joining forces, though, the three companies are positioning themselves to meet the emerging threat from US rivals such as Netflix, the Internet TV provider that is expanding rapidly in Europe.
"We're increasingly competing and thinking about the new global competitors who are able to go very quickly across major markets," BSkyB CEO Jeremy Darroch said this week at a conference in Dublin. "They take up more of our mind time than some of our traditional competitors."
Closer to home, Darroch also hopes that the combined clout of Sky Europe will help him respond to BT, the former British phone monopoly that has challenged BSkyB by snapping up valuable European and English soccer rights and showing games for free to broadband subscribers.
While the joint development of series such as Diabolik show an "aspiration to make things at an international scale," according to Stuart Murphy, entertainment director at Sky in Britain, others point to the danger of cross-border programs being too bland for the tastes of Brits, Italians and Germans.
"The Murdoch project of a pan-European pay-TV colossus may work only on the condition each of the three television markets - UK, Germany and Italy - will preserve its own peculiarity, their formats, their local flavours," said Massimo Scaglioni, assistant professor of media history at Catholic University of Milan. "Their customers are incredibly different."
- Bloomberg
