With the match on Sunday, November 25 already secured for live broadcast on BBC1 Scotland, the clubs' decision to sell the match to subscribers in the rest of the British Isles forced the switch in kick-off time from 2.30pm to noon.

The final Old Firm game of last season drew more buyers outside Scotland than Celtic's title party at home to St Mirren and two other pay-per-view trials featuring two Rangers games, at home to Dunfermline and away to Dundee.

This latest move comes against a background of Rangers and Celtic campaigning to convince Sky to launch a permanent 'Old Firm Roadshow' and market all their SPL away games on pay-per-view under the terms of new TV deals currently being concluded for the next three seasons.

Opposition from the SPL's smaller clubs has all but evaporated amid falling Old Firm travelling supports. Rangers chairman David Murray and Celtic chief executive Ian McLeod see the format's wholesale introduction as necessary if they are to nail down a £10million annual TV bounty for each club.

According to insiders, the non-Scots sales figures for what was essentially a 'meaningless' Old Firm clash were better than the very best achieved by the flagging ITV Digital's otherwise successful Premiership Plus presentations since August.

With Rangers already needing to win at Parkhead to stay in the title hunt, the November game could bring in an additional £1million in TV revenue, highlighting how the Old Firm are bucking the trend of sliding viewing figures for televised Champions League matches and Premiership highlights.

Hence, the very real understanding not just within Premiership boardrooms, as reported yesterday in these pages, but also within the Sky hierarchy in London, that the Old Firm may need to be brought into the top-flight English game to pep up the product.

If Premiership pay- per- view uptake on ITV Digital has been good, the figures for 'free' live Nationwide League matches have dipped to the point where some games have attracted fewer view-ers than the number of paying spectators in the stands.

Sky executives are studying the likely effects on their figures of having the away Old Firm SPL fixtures removed from their normal Saturday tea-time options. Given that they are effectively the sole bidder for Scottish football rights, a compromise solution before Christmas is inevitable.

With ITV Digital contemplating closure and the sale of their 1.2m subscriber base to rivals Sky in the New Year, the likely consolidation of TV football platforms looks certain to pave the way for a consolidation of the product - namely, the Old Firm starring in the Premiership.

But the price in the interim, as the broadcaster's agreement to sell next month's match underlines, will be to concede more and more of Rangers and Celtic's away games to pay-per-view audiences.