Mediaset Premium

» see mediasetpremium.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Italian pay television arrived through the aerial on the roof rather than a dish on the balcony, and that was the entire proposition. When Mediaset Premium launched on 20 January 2005, Sky Italia already owned the satellite. Mediaset owned something else: the digital terrestrial network that every Italian household could already receive. You bought a prepaid card at a newsstand or a tobacconist, pushed it into a decoder and watched the match. No installer and no dish.

It worked immediately. Two weeks before the service went live, almost all of the 280,000 smart cards made for launch had been sold. The product at that point was pure pay-per-view, and the thing being viewed was Serie A. Mediaset had bought rights to matches and was selling them one at a time, which suited a country where plenty of people wanted one specific club on one specific Sunday and nothing else for the rest of the month.

On 19 January 2008 it stopped being only that and added proper subscription packages, becoming a full pay-TV platform rather than a turnstile. A shelf of cinema and series channels followed, and for a decade the Premium brand meant that shelf sitting beside the free Mediaset networks on the same tuner. At its height it was serving around two million subscribers across all the account types.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the card economy ~

The prepaid card is what made Premium culturally distinct and it is why people remember the platform fondly even now. Sky was a subscription in the British and American sense, a direct debit that renewed until you called to stop it. Premium was a thing you bought the way you bought a phone top-up: in cash over a counter, for a fixed amount of football. That model let it reach households that would never have signed a twelve-month contract, and it also meant the company never really knew how many customers it had, only how many cards had moved.

Serie A reached Turkey too, which is the odd piece of this for me. Italian football was on Turkish television through the nineties and into the two-thousands, and the clubs and the commentators were familiar enough that the league felt close. The platform carrying it was not close at all. The distance here is not the sport, it is the plumbing underneath: a decoder and a card system that only made sense inside one country's broadcasting arrangement.

~ where the football went ~

A platform built on sports rights lives or dies at auction, and Premium started losing auctions. The Champions League exclusivity it had held in Italy ran out in 2018. On 16 July 2018 DAZN took internet rights to three Serie A matches a week for the following three seasons, pulling the best fixtures onto a service that needed no hardware at all. Each loss was survivable on its own. Together they took the football off the card.

The finances arrived before the endgame did. In 2016 Mediaset Premium posted a loss of 384 million euros, and the parent group closed its worst year on record at minus 294.5 million, blaming 341 million of the damage on the collapse of Vivendi's agreement to buy Premium and the fight with Vincent Bolloré that followed. A buyer had been found for the loss-making division and then the buyer had walked. By the summer of 2017 the subscriber count was running at least 100,000 behind the previous year.

~ the two endings ~

On 30 March 2018 Mediaset announced a deal with Sky Italia: Premium channels would go out to Sky subscribers, and Sky content would come down to terrestrial viewers. Read as a partnership it was a truce after thirteen years of undercutting each other. Fourteen months later Mediaset's own platform was gone and Sky was still carrying the channels, which settles which reading was right.

The platform closed on 1 June 2019. Premium Play and Premium Online went with it, subscribers had been allowed to cancel free of charge through May, and from that date the channels were carried on Mediaset's own Infinity service and on Sky. Nothing was transmitting on digital terrestrial under the Premium name anymore. The brand itself took another two and a half years to finish: on 10 January 2022 the last of the Premium channels went off, the cinema channels among them, and the name stopped appearing on any screen in Italy. mediasetpremium.it answers today with a page that says "Domain not configured."

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