SKY Business

loplisover

Hello,

I am a landlady of a pub, I decided to get SKY sports back in August last year, it was very expensive but If you are going to have a pub you have to show football or you will not be very busy. However, they wanted £832 from us a month! We were getting footfall in but not as much as we needed to generate that amount of money. A lot of our competitors were going to the pub down the road which was showing SKY illegally, they were going there because they can get the 3pm games on a Saturday and we cannot. We made a complaint about this to SKY but as far as we can tell they are still showing illegal SKY.

We were the ones doing things by the book and getting 'screwed' over. We could not afford to keep paying for SKY as it was too expensive and by paying SKY it meant that we were getting behind on other bills. We therefore decided to stop paying for SKY and cancel the contract. The only problem with this is that if you cancel half way through they want the remainder of the contract which is £4312.21. We cannot afford to pay this, if we could then we would still have SKY. I have told them that I do not want to pay them for the remainder as if I have to pay that amount then I want to be able to watch SKY. Why should I have to pay for a service that I am not using?

They have now passed us on to a debt collection agency who want us to set up a payment plan to pay it back to SKY. I really do not want to pay for a service which I will not be receiving nor can I afford. I have no money to give them as I also owe other companies money which I would regard as more important such as electricity and gas.

What should I do?

Browntoa

you signed a contract Im afraid , the debt is valid

loplisover

But I am no longer receiving the product so why should I pay for something that I am not getting? For example last year when I cancelled my car insurance because I wanted to move to another company with a better deal, they did not make me pay the remainder of the contract that I had signed up to, instead they made me pay a cancellation fee of £120.00 instead of the £500 that I would have owed

Browntoa

you stopped paying , the contract was not terminated

quote:-

We therefore decided to stop paying for SKY and cancel the contract.

loplisover

Your answers are very blunt and not very informative. Can you please explain, are you trying to say that if we had gone about this in another way we would have had a cancellation fee rather than paying the remainder?

JJ_Egan

You took out a contract for xx months and agreed to pay xx yes .
You not Sky decided you did want to use the service and stopped using it .
Sky are still supplying but you have chosen not to use the service .
You cannot cancel the contract that you signed up to .
You are not doing things by the book at all in trying to avoid a valid contract payments .

footyguy

It appears the OP owes £000's to an energy supplier too.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5252608

:cool:

londonTiger

how do you know that the other pub has sky illegally?

Btw what a bloody rip off, £800+ for a sky tv. That must be a huge dent in profits.

spiro

You are a business customer who took out a fixed term contract with Sky, the fact you didn't do your sums correctly is not there problem.

lvf

londonTiger wrote: »

how do you know that the other pub has sky illegally?

loplisover wrote: »

they were going there because they can get the 3pm games on a Saturday and we cannot.

FYI, Sky has not and has never had the right to screen football on a Saturday at 3pm. In the football world, it is now seen as one of the daftest laws out there, and is supposedly in place "to protect attendances at the 3pm kick offs". The blackout is between 2.45pm and 5.15pm. It was that bad that Sky were banned from showing the first 15 minutes of 'El Clasico' (Barcelona v Real Madrid to the non-footy fans!) live earlier this season. See:

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/real-madrid-vs-barcelona-why-will-the-first-15-minutes-of-el-clasico-not-be-shown-on-british-tv-9813800.html

Given the fact that the 3pm kick offs are live, my guess is a European decoder in that pub. Sky have absolutely no power over this and any complaints to Sky are going to fall on deaf ears, especially as they are doing nothing wrong against Sky. The Premier League, maybe, but Sky have not been wronged. See the following link for more information:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17150054

I hope this clears up the confusion on the rival pub and the frustration on the complaint as well. Good luck with the rest of your case, I hope others can help with that.

spiro

loplisover wrote: »

Your answers are very blunt and not very informative. Can you please explain, are you trying to say that if we had gone about this in another way we would have had a cancellation fee rather than paying the remainder?

in lots of business contracts the cancellation fee equals what you are due to pay for the remainder of the contract, welcome to the world of business.