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IEC, which is selling the rights on behalf of the International Athletics Federation, will retain the broadcast sponsorship rights under the ESPN deal, although the value of these will be small given the pay-broadcaster’s limited penetration.

For more information see the next issue of TV Sports Markets.

In a letter sent to broadcasters last week, Uefa explains that the new Uefa Events company will be split into two divisions, operations and marketing.

Guy-Laurent Epstein, the current head of media sales and Le Floch’s number two, will head up a marketing division, responsible for all marketing and commercial activities, including media rights sales, across all Uefa competitions.

Deals have yet to be agreed in Russia, where dominant pay-broadcaster NTV has submitted only a derisory offer, and Albania, where the league still has concerns about local broadcasters’ ability to control the distribution of unauthorised smartcards. Other deals, such as the rights in planes and ships (presently held by IMG), and free-to-air deals in Africa, have also yet to be concluded.

Second-party television rights – the rights to sell matches back into visiting team’s home markets – have long been a key part of agency revenues, with the biennial draws for the World Cup and Euro qualifying groups capable of landing agencies with large cash windfalls.

Commercial broadcaster Antenna 1, which ignited the market with a spree of acquisitions in the summer and autumn of 2008, has dropped its coverage of Formula One, one year into a three-year contract. There are also question-marks over its coverage of Uefa’s Europa League, six months into a three-year deal.

The Mediapro agency is disputing a claim by Spanish commercial broadcaster Telecinco last week that it had acquired two of Spain’s away qualifiers – against the Czech Republic and Lithuania. Telecinco bought the rights from the B4 agency, which in turn had sublicensed the rights from Sportfive.

The government is thought unlikely to reject the “populist” recommendations to extend the list in the lead-up to the election. Extending the list would have repercussions on almost all rights-holders.

IMG, the Asian Tour’s new agency partner, has sold the rights on a market-by-market basis, with sales helped by its ability to bundle Asian Tour programming with its existing European Tour rights.

The Tour’s previous incumbent, pan-regional broadcaster ESPN Star Sports, had a matching rights option but chose to exercise it only in India.

With just two weeks to go until the start of the Winter Games in Vancouver the IOC suffered a blow when the Asociación de Canales de Televisión del Ecuador, representing Ecuador’s free-to-air broadcasters, said that it would not make direct bid, instead requesting that negotiations be carried out via the OTI.

For the full story, see the latest issue of TV Sports Markets.

The two-year deal with the MP&Silva agency, covering the 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons, is Digi’s latest sports rights acquisition and continues the aggressive sports rights strategy it began last year.

For more information see the latest edition of TV Sports Markets.

The EBU is continuing discussions with MTV in Hungary to ensure that coverage of this year’s football World Cup stays with the public-service broadcaster. MTV had been looking to sell on some or all of the rights, which it had acquired through the EBU, after government-imposed budget cuts of 30 per cent left it struggling to pay its bills.

Barcelona’s defeat of Manchester United in the Uefa Champions League final was the most-watched sports event in both Spain and the UK. The final also made the top five sports audiences of the year in France and Italy.

“We believe that Google-YouTube can certainly challenge the traditional powers in broadcasting”, he told TV Sports Markets. “Most big media companies have built their media conglomerates around live sports.

SingTel’s Mio TV service had 126,000 subscribers at end-September 2009.

Meanwhile Zee’s sports division, covering the Zee Sports and Ten Sports channels as well as Zee’s other sports interests, including Mumbai FC and the Indian Cricket League (ICL), reported a loss of Rs276 million ($6 million) for the three months to end-December 2009. The loss is understood to be largely due to paying out player contracts after the scrapping of the ICL’s 2009-10 edition.

Last week Ufa Sports is understood to have picked up the Cypriot federation, beating competition from the usual suspects of Sportfive, IMG and Kentaro. Ufa is also making a strong bid to win the Israeli federation after responding to an invitation to tender last year, although long-term incumbent Infront has a matching rights-option.

Rune Haug, NRK’s sports chief, told local press that it had been a tough negotiation in the course of which the EBU came close to losing the rights. But he said the EBU won the deal after submitting a revised bid in the new year.

The deal covers four championships in total – a Nordic and an alpine World Championship in both 2015 and 2017.

ITV, however, through its coverage of the Uefa Champions League and England national team matches, accounted for the top four sports programmes of the year and seven of the Top 10.