Go has been proudly announcing that it won the exclusive rights to the UEFA Champions League for three more years – but its rival Melita is clearly less than amused.

It recently argued (Sunday Times of Malta, March 29), that the fragmentation of sports content was creating an unnecessary burden on consumers. This argument has been simmering for years, since consumers found that they would have to subscribe to both providers if they wanted to watch all the football.

But is this only a consumer matter? Is there a sound business argument for or against this fragmentation?

When Go first started bidding against Melita for sport, there was a sound business case. It was trying to carve a market out of one that had been dominated by Melita for years.

With most channels, Go’s offering was matched by what Melita already did. It was only on sport that it could have such a compelling offering that customers would be lured from its rival. The point was not to make money off the sports channel itself – it almost certainly did not – but to get clients to switch provider. It was all about the bigger picture, pun intended.

Indeed, the auction process was a bloody one, with Go having to guess how desperately Melita wanted the rights – and ensure that its bid was comfortably ahead.

But this time around, the market is more mature. Does Go really need the exclusive sports content?

In June 2010, Go had 52,499 subscribers, compared with Melita’s 90,687, just 37 per cent of the market. By June 2014, the gap had narrowed considerably. Go held almost 47 per cent of the market, with Melita’s hold whittled down to 53 per cent.

It would appear that Go did not want to take any risks and had to assume that Melita would this time bid for the rights. This means it probably once again paid through the nose for content whose cost it would never hope to recoup through the premium paid for the sports channel.

Is the market saturated? Between June 2008 and 2010, the total number of TV subscribers grew from 129,801 to 143,186. In the two years until June 2014, the number only went up by 109, to 149,158.

A Broadcasting Authority survey in 2013 found that 32.6 per cent of the audience did not watch TV at all, over 60 per cent of them aged under 50. The sample was too small to reach any conclusions about sports content specifically – only 0.3 per cent were listed as watching Go Sports – but it is clear that there are thousands of people who are not willing to pay extra for premium content and who switched to Dreambox or satellite.

Melita has gone on the warpath, and has once again brought up the consumer aspect, calling on the authorities to intervene and establish a TV rights sharing protocol along the lines of those in other European jurisdictions.

If that happened here, Go would have no interest in bidding without a commercial gain from winning the rights. Likewise, Melita would be a fool to bid, knowing that it would have to sell the rights to Go. Taking this argument to the extreme, would we end up with no one bidding?

Is this in the consumers’ interest? One option would be for Melita and Go to submit a joint bid to both air all the football, admitting that there are now other more compelling reasons for customers to remain loyal.