Sky Germany drops Paramount deal
December 27, 2011
By Chris Forrester
Sky Deutschland has confirmed to the Financial Times German edition that its deal to show Paramount-branded movies is not being renewed.
Instead, says the FT, Sky Deutschland is concentrating on soccer. On December 1, it launched its Sky Sport News HD channel, and over the past month or so had secured exclusive coverage of all of the Italian Serie A top-flight league soccer games, plus the DFB Cup series for another 4 years.
CEO Brian Sullivan also warned that despite reaching its long-awaited 3 million-home subscriber target (he said by the end of the year Sky-D would have some 3.2 million subscribers) it had still not completely broken even and would lose up to €175 million.
Consumers are also not happy, with some subscribers threatening lawsuits and arguing that they would not have renewed their subscriptions had they known the Paramount movie deal was ending.
At September 30th, it had some 818,000 HD ‘Premium’ subscribers.