Turning 43 was, perhaps, more joyous for Delia Bushell than for most people. “My birthday was the day of our big press launch,” says Bushell. Then she adds: “Nothing better than sharing your birthday with Gary Lineker on stage.”
As managing director of TV and sport for BT, Bushell is Lineker’s new boss. He is BT’s biggest on-screen signing so far, as the phone company turned pay-TV insurgent parks ever more tanks on Sky’s premium-sports lawn. The hoopla heralded Lineker as co-presenter of live Uefa Champions League, to which BT has exclusive rights for the next three seasons – having poached them from ITV and Sky in an eye-watering £897m deal. “What we are looking for is a really stellar A-list presenting lineup, but one with a slightly more accessible and friendly tone than Sky Sports is perceived to have,” says Bushell. “And we want that talent to be a broad range, with recent ex-footballers alongside long-established faces of British sport, such as Gary Lineker.”
Bushell reasons her on-screen team needs to reach a “broad audience”. So far, roughly 50% of BT Sport’s subscribers have come not from Sky, but from watching only free-to-air football on the BBC and ITV. Indeed, BT’s Premier League channels have been offered “free” with BT broadband – a tempting ploy which, for the last seven quarters, has seen BT add more broadband customers than any other provider. But Lineker and all-new augmented reality studios don’t come cheap. The Champions League is so costly that BT has now abandoned that beguilingly simple retail pricing model – to loud grumbles on Twitter. A broadband subscription alone is no longer enough: to get the BT Sport Europe channel, customers will have to sign up for a BT TV set-top box – or shell out £5 a month.
The offer is, acknowledges Bushell, now “not as simple” as it was before – but, she insists, “retaining simplicity and simple price points was important in how we drive it forward”. She also argues that even £5 a month is a “knockout price” for customers – comparing it to a minimum of £45 for a Sky Sports subscription. Still, diehard football fans (wanting all Premier League coverage, plus Champions League) will be paying £6 a month more than in 2014/15 – £5 for BT Sport Europe, and a £1 increase on their Sky Sports bill. That’s because the TV rights have become so expensive. In the 2015/16 season, BT and Sky between them will pay the Premier League alone more than £1bn more than it received in 2012/13 – the year before BT Sport launched. Though the blame for this is often aimed at BT, Bushell has another explanation. Because the Premier League sells its rights in a blind auction, different broadcasters can end up paying wildly different prices.
“From the previous Premier League auction, Sky’s prices were inflated by 80%, and ours were inflated by 17%. That’s probably a question you would need to ask them,” she says. “We feel we have actually bid in a very rational, disciplined way. We’re not on a trolley dash to take all the sports rights in the marketplace.”
In the fullness of time, Sky might not be the only target at which BT takes aim. BT has announced that it will soon launch a Freeview channel, BT Sport Showcase, able to bid for even listed events such as Wimbledon or the FA Cup Final – which, with the BBC’s sports budget under pressure, could be tempting targets. “I wouldn’t comment or speculate on future rights, because clearly keeping your cards close to your chest is key to success,” says Bushell. “I don’t think there are any sports rights that we would say are not for us.”
Premier League football has, of course, traditionally been the main driver of Sky’s pricey subscriptions. Bushell knows the strengths of – and threats to – Sky’s high-cost, hardware-heavy business model from the inside, having spent 14 years working for Sky. Now, she argues, the consumer trend is “about moving away from full-fat pay TV, to pay-TV lite”. BT has, for example, done a “world-first” deal to be able to bundle Netflix into its subscription package.
Indeed, alongside BBC2’s The Fall and Wolf Hall, Bushell lists House of Cards as one of her own box-set pleasures. “At the moment, it’s just a real golden age of premium TV drama in the US and the UK,” she says. “That’s clearly an area that we would now like to start to cover, and offer BT subscribers more exclusive stuff.” So should we expect BT to commission its own premium drama series, and to launch an entertainment channel? “All of those are options. There’s nothing more we can disclose. We’re in conversations with many people in the industry.”
As far as US drama is concerned, Bushell is taking a “watch this space” approach. She’s plainly aware of Sky’s success with its HBO deal – not only in bringing viewers to Sky Atlantic for Game of Thrones, but in turbocharging its on-demand box-set offer. She says the biggest lesson she learned at Sky was “matching great strategy with great execution”. So, just as Sky once ramped up numerous HD channels to sell HD boxes, BT too is now matching TV content to technology.
In a European first, BT’s Champions League coverage will see the launch of both an ultra-high-definition “4K” TV channel and a 4K set-top box to view it on. It’s no coincidence that these will be delivered only to high-speed (and higher-price) BT Infinity broadband connections. “Sport and television are emotional products that really connect in to subscribers,” says Bushell. “And if you’re a broadband provider, combining the two into a great-value bundle has a real anchor effect.”
So far, that anchor effect is having the desired impact. In BT’s results for 2014/15, full-year revenue for BT Consumer – including retail telephony, broadband and TV – was up 7%, with the Ebitda profit measure up 24%. Broadband and TV revenues were up 16% over the full year. It’s a trend Bushell believes will continue.
“At our press event, some journalists asked Glenn Hoddle why he’d decided to leave Sky after 20 years. He said, ‘I’ve loved my time at Sky – but I think the future is with BT Sport. I see them innovating and challenging’,” she says. “And it’s similar for me. To participate in a market disrupter, and actually have some personal impact on the television market, is quite a rare opportunity. It’s one you’ve got to grab with both hands.”
Curriculum vitae
Age 43
Education Croydon High School; Keble College, Oxford (BA in history, MPhil in international relations)
Career 1996 strategy consultant, Arthur D Little 1998 strategy and business development analyst, Pearson 2000 head of Sky Travel, managing director of Sky Ireland and director of broadband and telephony, BSkyB 2011 Sky Italia, rising to chief commercial officer 2014 managing director, BT TV and Sport
