Melita rues GO position on football premium talks

Melita has urged GO plc to rethink its position on premium content, as talks in the parliamentary social affairs committee proved inconclusive on the issue of football broadcasting rights.

Melita has reiterated its position in favour of making premium content available to all pay-TV networks through wholesale agreements on the sharing of sports, movies and other television content. The debate has been sparked off by Nationalist whip David Agius.

But GO plc, which has invested anything upwards of €250,000 to secure the rights to the UK’s Premier League and Italian Serie A broadcasts, is reluctant to share content with Melita. “GO pursued such content at a significant cost through a competitive bidding process, aimed at gaining a competitive position that mitigates channel capacity restrictions resulting from the number of frequencies assigned to GO by the authorities,” the company said. It added that Melita was not faced with similar channel capacity restrictions, and that granting of access to premium content to third parties “would lead to GO losing on the value of the considerable investment it made in the Premier League and Serie A.”

“Melita remains disappointed that GO continues to insist that any agreement on wholesale exchanges of football and premium content must be tied to sharing of infrastructure,” Melita said in a statement. “Melita views GO’s tactic purely as a deliberate and conscious attempt  to delay and hinder Parliament from arriving at solutions which benefit all consumers, Malta, the Government and even the operators themselves.”

Melita says it had already approached GO to discuss content sharing when it had exclusivity on all major football and sporting content. “Unfortunately, even then GO declined to cooperate with Melita in the best interest of consumers,” Melita said.

Melita says GO has no solid case to prove it is not in a position to replicate whatever Melita has in terms of network infrastructure. “It remains perfectly possible for GO to have as many channels as it wants. That it does not have that many channels is a result of GO’s investment choices; it is not a result of an inability to compete, which is the underlying rationale of open access.”