By Alistair Smout
LONDON (Reuters) - Sky (L:SKYB) led Britain's top share index lower on Wednesday after paying a record sum to secure TV rights for top English soccer games.
Shares in Sky fell 3.1 percent after agreeing to pay 4.2 billion pounds to show 126 live Premier League matches a season between 2016 to 2019, far outstripping forecasts. BT secured 42 games a season for 960 million.
Sky said it would pay by cutting costs and raising prices.
"While arguably this should mean unchanged consensus numbers ... some investors are likely to de-rate the shares because of increased uncertainty around future content renewals and reduced future flexibility on costs," Barclays analysts said in a note.
Shares in BT (L:BT) rose 4 percent after securing 42 games a season for 960 million pounds, having pressured Sky to pay a premium for its content.
By 1157 GMT, Britain blue-chip share index was down 27.90 points, or 0.1 percent, at 6,801.22, still up nearly 4 percent on the year.
Africa-focused oil and gas explorer Tullow Oil (L:TLW) fell 3.2 percent after reporting a $2 billion pre-tax loss, its first in 15 years.
Tullow also scrapped its final dividend payment, a high profile casualty of the slump in the price of oil as other firms seek to protect their payouts.
Among the top gainers, ARM (L:ARM) rose 3.6 percent after the British chip designer posted a 25-percent rise in fourth-quarter profit, ahead of expectations, helped by a strong year end in companies licensing its technology and rising royalty revenues from customers such as Apple.
Another standout gainer was Reckitt Benckiser Group (L:RB), whose shares rose 3.3 percent to touch a record high after the British consumer goods maker said it was launching a new cost-savings programme, noting that 2015 would be similar to last year.
Outside the blue-chips, British data centre provider Telecity Group (L:TCY) rose 13.1 percent after it said it had reached a non-binding, all-share merger agreement with New York-listed Interxion (N:INXN) to help both tap growing client demand to use "cloud" technology.