BT Sport Premier League launch attracts 764,000

The first match of this year’s Premier League drew in an average audience of 629,000 for BT Sport, according to BARB overnight figures.

The match peaked at 764,000 – slightly less than Sky’s first match last season between Swansea and West Ham, which peaked at 843,000.

According to BARB, Sky’s offering of free access to its channel for the whole of Saturday secured the company a peak audience of 3.1 million viewers to its first game of the season.

However, head of BT Sport Simon Green does not appear worried about rival Sky’s greater audience figures.

“Our audience compares very well with Sky’s first game last season despite them having had years to establish an audience as opposed to weeks and a bigger subscriber base,” said Green.

“We are pleased by the BARB figures but they don’t tell the whole story. That’s because we have hundreds of thousands of customers who can watch via platforms that BARB doesn’t capture.”

BT Sport will show 38 exclusively live football matches from the Barclays Premier League, including 18 of the ‘top picks’, for each of the next three seasons. Manchester City’s home games against Hull City and Everton are scheduled to be screened by BT Sport before the end of October, with more games to come later in the season. The channels will also show live FA Cup with Budweiser matches for the next five seasons.