Sick As A Parrot

BT, the UK's main telco, has paid £6.7m (approx $10m) a game, yes, a game to show 38 Premier League soccer matches a season for the next three years.

Meanwhile, Sky has paid £760m a season for the remaining 116 games.

Sky attracts 1 -3 m viewers a game, so that's £2 -5 a viewer they're paying, production costs notwithstanding (and they're huge).

And all the money goes not to the clubs, but to the agents and players, as ever.

Another way of looking at this is the cost per hour. At around £4m for Swansea v Norwich, I'd suggest that this is rather worse value for money than Downton Abbey's reported £1m per hour, with an eight time higher viewing figure and massive overseas sales.

If you do anything else in television, you must wonder why a marginal genre like football gets so much of the pie.