The Daily Mail today accused ministers of smoothing the way for a deal that favoured Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB. It quoted a source familiar with the negotiations, who claimed that the Chancellor had met with European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes.
"After that, the commission had a change of heart. It had all the hallmarks of a coordinated lobbying campaign," the source told the Daily Mail.
The EC had initially adopted a tough stance on ending the monopoly that Sky currently enjoys on live Premiership football.
Early in the long negotiation process, it wanted the TV rights owner, the Premier League, to sell two equal packages of 69 games and allow Sky to only bid for one.
As negotiations progressed, the EC ruled this out, but in September it threatened the league with legal action for backtracking. In October, the EC was pushing for five packages of games, of which Sky could only have four.
However, the deal announced yesterday consists of six packages of 23 games each and allows Sky to won all but one of them. Sky's buying power, coupled with NTL's assertion that it is not interested given the terms, is likely to give it 83% of games, with the rest going to a terrestrial broadcaster, possibly ITV.
NTL said yesterday that it was "unlikely" to make a bid, confirming its recent statement that it would need to be able to show half of all games to make the rights viable.
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