THERE is a truism in television.

It runs something like this: God may have made heaven and earth but live football made Sky.

The satellite behemoth has prospered in the UK on the reality that people love football - particularly the Barclays Premier League - so much that they are prepared to pay for it in delicious monthly portions.

Sky have consequently raised the bar in splashing out for television rights and its largesse has witnessed other competitors such as Setanta falling by the wayside. ESPN, a company with considerably more financial muscle than Sky, have left English football, if only for the moment, because the numbers did not quite add up for them. The portions of direct debit were dwarfed by the money that had to be bid to retain and attract customers.

Yet Sky now faces a challenge, perhaps of Olympic proportions. It has a competitor with money, nous and a strategy it believes will make financial sense. BT have jumped into television with an ambition that causes a gasp of breath.

This is not merely related to the cheque they signed for coverage of the English Premier League matches - £738m for 32 matches every season for the next three seasons - though their deal for the SPFL remains unspecified but much, much more modest. It extends to the £1bn they have spent in launching BT Sport.

A drizzly day in East London is transformed by stepping into BT's studios in the Olympic Park. The utilitarian building that served as the international broadcast centre during the Olympics remains recognisable, though its walls will be, in time, stripped to be replaced by glass.

Inside, though, is a cavernous arena that holds the whispers of TV production staff preparing for a day's broadcast but shouts long and convincingly about BT's chutzpah in a business that exists on a mixture of style and substance.

The major studio space includes a pitch that can be lit from below to allow presenters to show practical demonstrations on how Arsenal can defend better (featuring Tony Adams, the former Gunners captain, and a boys' team) or how Simona Halep could use her footwork to confound Petra Kvitova in the New Haven Open (featuring Sam Smith, the former tennis player and now BT presenter). The Romanian must have been watching because she won in straight sets.

The visit to the studios is made extraordinarily vivid by the downbeat presence of Jamie Hindhaugh, chief operating officer, who found the studio pitch on eBay but has devoted the last few years of his life to the god of telly, a relentless boss.

Hindhaugh, 46, began his career in what is routinely seen as a glamorous business by ordering cabs for the BBC as an 18-year-old. He was subsequently integral to the BBC coverage of the 2012 Olympics as head of production. "That went all right," I say, and he smiles before recounting how he was headhunted by BT during the Games.

"Basically, I did the Olympics and then the Paralympics and had a day off. It was a Friday and I slept. I then started work with BT and I think I have had one day off since then." This is said without any anguish. 'I suppose it is a vocation," he says. "You have to love it to do it."

Hindhaugh scouted several sites before BT Sport took a lease on the 80,000 square-foot centre in Stratford. Work started on February 5 and it was completed for production on July 1.

Did he ever believe it would not be completed in time? "No," he says swiftly. "We work to deadlines." The figures tell a story of the scale of the project: the largest LED-lit studio in the world, seven galleries, 20 edit suites, eight voice-over booths, audience holding area for 160 people, 32 lorries of concrete to lay the floor, 98,000 man hours to complete the project, 1,000,000 screws to hold it together, 1000 litres of paint to cover it up, 200 kilometres of cable to allow it to beam pictures to a waiting nation. This, then, is the body of the beast but what is its spirit? BT Sport want to be more than just live football with live coverage of tennis and rugby being joined by MotoGP. But they seek also to be an entertainment channel. It is why they have recruited Clare Balding for a sports magazine programme and Tim Lovejoy for a panel show on a Saturday morning. This explains why a visit to the studio involves watching Lovejoy trying to replicate a vault by gymnast Beth Tweddle.

However, BT Sports knows their prime beef is live football. Grant Best, senior executive producer, points out that the coverage has been well-received and that criticism of Michael Owen, the former Liverpool player turned co-commentator, did not chime with the company's views of his merits.

Owen, amiable and honest, admits outside Craven Cottage after the Fulham v Arsenal match that his new role has been testing but rightly insists he is improving.

The problem for BT producers is not the quality of presenters or analysts. Jake Humphrey, formerly of the BBC, is a deceptively tough questioner and Steve McMananam, formerly of Liverpool, and Owen Hargreaves, formerly of Manchester United, are proficient analysts.

The challenge is to make BT different but not so different they will scare off viewers. BT would love more access to dressing-rooms and to players but are restricted at the moment in the Premier League to employing a former referee to comment on his erstwhile colleagues and to moving the live score box.

However, the words and the pictures are solid and can attract no damaging criticisms. It is the figures that matter.

This is a contest over broadband, phone lines and internet protocol television. BT will be pleased that a million subscribers have picked up their "free" offer for the sports channels. This offer, of course, only costs nothing if one has the broadband service but it is a more than neat marketing trick.

They will be gratified, too, that their first football match (Liverpool v Stoke City) attracted 750,000 viewers and sanguine that Ms Balding was watched by about 1000 viewers. Hard-nosed analysts, too, are relaxed about the channel only attracting about £10m in advertising in the first year.

The stakes are huge. This is about who wins the right to provide broadband, phone lines and entertainment to the mass of the British pay-for-TV market. BT, a £26bn company, will not be shouldered out of the market easily.

It was fun to spend a Saturday under the lights of a Straford studio and in the shadows of such as Owen and McMamanan. But it was also deeply serious. BT mean business.