StarHub has just announced that it has won the exclusive broadcast rights to the UEFA Euro 2012 football tournament to be held in Poland and Ukraine from 8 Jun to 2 Jul next year. This latest development is also the first to be made under the next cross-carriage ruling for exclusive content - this means that StarHub will have to make the content available to SingTel's mio TV subscribers. We are quite surprised by the move, as a joint bid - as in the case of the recent World Cup 2010 - would make more sense, both economically and logistically.

While StarHub will get all the advertising and subscription revenue, it will have to pay SingTel for the carrying cost - it must also offer SingTel subscribers the same price that it will charge its own subscribers. In any case, StarHub said that it has done a thorough evaluation of the content before arriving at the decision to carry it exclusively.

The telco will provide more details at a later stage, including pricing and cross-carriage details. Overall, we do not expect the latest development to have a huge impact on SingTel's subscriber base nor will it aggressively increase StarHub's subscriber base.