Setanta Sports' deal with Virgin Media, allowing the latter's customers to receive 46 live Premiership games among other sports events for £8 a month, undercutting the £9.99 price
that Sky customers and Freeview customers must pay, is further evidence of an alliance of enemies of Sky being formed.
In a further twist of the knife in Sky's back, subscribers to Virgin Media's £38.50 a month XL package, which includes Sky Sports, will get Setanta Sports for free.
For the same deal, Sky footie fans will have to pay £47.99.
Comparisons between rival pay-TV packages are hard to make these days since the inclusion of broadband and telephony offers and the loss of Sky basic channels to Virgin Media customers.
Nevertheless, for avid armchair footie fans who don't give a fig about broadband or Lost, the message is clear, there is a better deal to be had on cable than satellite.
Meanwhile, the same alliance of pay-TV rivals to Sky has ensured, by stirring up Ofcom, that Sky will be unable to launch a sports service on Freeview next season to challenge Setanta.
Last week, it was BT Vision that delivered a broadside at Sky, with an offer of 242 Premiership games on-demand from 10pm on matchdays for £4 a month. This drew an angry retort from Sky, pointing out that BT Vision requires a £17.99 a month BT Broadband subscription plus one-off connection costs of £140.
Sky is also keen to rubbish Setanta's earlier boast that as many as 40 of its 46 Premiership games would feature English football's "big four".
In fact, of the 19 matches announced so far, only 10 feature the big four.
When Sky feels the need to attack upstarts like Setanta and BT Vision, you know it is on the back foot.
Which does rather beg the question: who is David and who is Goliath in this fight?
Is there really a lack of competition in the pay-TV market? It doesn't sound like it to me.
Colin Grimshaw is the deputy editor of Media Week
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