Sky Deutschland AG (SKYD.XE) can use its strengthened financial position to hold on to valuable football broadcast rights for years to come, making them a platform for growth and eventual profitability, Chief Executive Brian Sullivan said.

"I'm not joking when I say we want to be the partner of German soccer league not only for the next years but for the next decades," Sullivan told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview Thursday.

"Sky Deutschland is now in a stronger financial position than ever in the past half-decade and the News Corp. commitment is valuable for any rights partner," including the top-flight German soccer league, the Bundesliga, the jewel in its crown.

Sky Deutschland holds the rights to broadcast live Bundesliga soccer until the end of the 2012/13 season. However, the German soccer league, or DFL, could start an auction for the rights to seasons beyond 2012/13 as soon as next year.

It is unlikely that the German pay-TV company will be profitable by then, but Sullivan, previously a long-serving manager at British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC (BSY.LN), is confident about the future due to the financial backing of News Corp. (NWS), its biggest shareholder with a 49.9% stake.

News Corp. also has a roughly 39% stake in BSkyB, where Sullivan worked for 10 years. In June it offered 700 pence a share to buy the 60.9% stake in BSkyB it doesn't already own, valuing the stake at about GBP7.8 billion. BSkyB's independent directors rebuffed the proposal, but have said they would support an offer of more than 800 pence a share.

News Corp. owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of this newswire and The Wall Street Journal.

BSkyB is the U.K.'s largest pay-TV operator with just under 10 million subscribers, building its dominance by paying huge sums for the broadcast rights to Premier League soccer. News Corp. has also used a similar strategy to drive subcriber growth at wholly-owned Sky Italia, where it holds satellite and Internet-TV rights for every Seria A football club.

Since News Corp. took an initial stake in Sky Deutschland in January 2008, it has injected around EUR1 billion into the business.

Still, it remains unclear when it can expect a return.

In the U.K. it took 20 years to turn around BSkyB, Sullivan noted, but he is confident it won't take that long to make Sky Deutschland profitable. At a media briefing last month, he said he expected the company to be "sustainable" in two to three years.

Sullivan acknowledges that the challenges in Germany are bigger than in the U.K. and Italy due to the strong position of public TV, which broadcasts Bundesliga highlights shortly after the final whistle each Saturday.

One reason why pay-TV in Germany isn't yet a success, despite huge investment, is the position of public TV in the country, said Axel Springer AG's Chief Executive Mathias Doepfner Wednesday in a keynote speech at the Medientage industry event in Munich.

Germans pay a monthly fee to fund public TV broadcasters, while access to cable means an additional monthly fee on top just to get free-to-air broadcasts, limiting the money available to spend on paid content.

After Sullivan took the helm, he started to team up with cable network providers, a strategy that is now bearing fruit.

This summer, Sky Deutschland teamed up with Kabel BW, Germany's third biggest cable network provider. In the first three months of that deal "we have seen a measurable, incremental lift in sales" on both the bundle with Kabel BW and standalone sign-ups to Sky Deutschland, from which both partners are benefiting, Sullivan said.

Similar collaborations with Germany's biggest cable network companies, Kabel Deutschland Holding AG (KD8.XE) and Liberty Global Inc.'s (LBTYA) Unitymedia are still the subject of negotiations.

-By Archibald Preuschat and Matthias Karpstein, Dow Jones Newswires; +49 211 13872 18; archibald.preuschat@dowjones.com