BT turned down the chance to bid for a show featuring former Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May.
BT Sport and TV managing director Delia Bushell said she hadn’t even considered trying to sign the team when their representatives were approaching broadcasters and other TV providers.
“To be honest I didn’t consider it. It just wasn’t right for us,” she told the Guardian Edinburgh International TV Festival. “It’s a fantastic franchise, but it made more sense for a global player like Netflix because Top Gear has huge US revenues as well.”
Amazon eventually signed up the three presenters and producer Andy Wilman for a reported fee of $250m (£160m) for three seasons, having reportedly beaten off competition from Netflix.
There has been speculation that BT would follow online services such as Netflix and Amazon, and its main UK pay-TV competitor Sky, in commissioning original programming to help drive signups to its TV service.
Bushell said the company’s deal to carry US channel AMC from this month had prompted a further flurry of enquiries from producers hoping to sell shows to BT.
“AMC obviously has triggered a lot of people to come to us, either from the US or from the UK,” she said. “I think there is a clear appeal to premium drama. That’s an obvious area. At this point we haven’t made a concrete plan.”
So far, BT’s primary investment in content has been the near £2bn it has spent on acquiring football rights to show all Uefa Champions League games starting this year and 42 Premier League games from next season.
The sports rights deals helped BT add 60,000 TV subscribers in the most recent quarter, taking its total BT TV customer base to more than 1.2 million.
