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Resurrecting plans for an in-house channel is one of a number of options being considered by the league. It is now in discussions with broadcasters and clubs and plans to release a tender for the next rights cycle towards the end of this season.

Setanta’s collapse earlier this year has left an £80 million shortfall in the FA’s books and a sizeable hole in its domestic broadcast coverage of the FA Cup.

The court’s decision, responding to a complaint by porn and football channel Conto TV, was heavily influenced by the opinion of Italy’s antitrust authority.

Last week the agency, owned by entrepreneur Riccardo Silva, was awarded the rights for the next two seasons by the football league, Lega Calcio, in the first collective deal for the rights in over a decade. Silva is paying €90.5 million for the 2010-2011 season and €91 million for 2011-2012.

The event in Rome was watched by almost 1.5 billion cumulative viewers, spread across 1,804 hours of coverage. The championships topped 50 million cumulative viewers in five countries, led by Italy (605 million) and followed by Germany (271 million), France (254 million), Spain (174 million) and the UK (87 million).

TF1 ad revenue for the nine months to September was €967m, down 19 per cent on the same period in 2008. TF1 channel programming costs fell from €749m last year to €664m, of which €54m was due to savings on sports rights costs relating to TF1’s coverage of Euro 2008 and €31m due to “optimisation of the programming schedule and cuts in programme costs”.

The increase came despite a 25.6-per-cent drop in advertising revenues, down to €47.4 million, as a result of the worsened economic climate. Subscription revenues rose year-on-year, driven by the launch of the Eurosport HD channel, which launched in May 2008 and now has four million paying subscribers, and Eurosport 2, which now has 38 million paying subscribers.

SABC agreed a $55 million, eight-year deal for Confederation of African Football rights, including Africa Cup of Nations competitions, at the end of 2008, but the contract was allegedly not approved by the SABC board.

Starhub’s pay-television revenue also rose two per cent in the quarter to

Zee is thought to be paying about $65 million for the remaining 50 per cent stake. Its initial 50-per-cent acquisition in 2006 had valued Ten at $114 million.

For more information see the latest issue of TV Sports Markets here

MP&Silva has bid €90.5 million a year for a new two-year deal starting in 2010-11, ahead of offers from Mediapro (€79 million) and Sportfive, IMG (about €75-76 million each). Bids were also received from the B4 and Kentaro agencies. A number of individual country bids, made by Telesport (Romania), Tring TV (Albania) and Multimesh Broadcasting Company (Nigeria), were discounted.

The federation is to issue a tender for a new four-year period, from 2010-11 to 2013-14, later this month. Incumbent Digitürk, D-Smart – the digital satellite television platform of media group Doğan, and partially state-owned telecoms operator Turk Telekom are all expected to bid.

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

The match peaked at over 10 million viewers for flagship channel TVE1.

MTV3 will pay at least 20 per cent more in its new deal, fighting off competition from free-to-air broadcaster Nelonen and pan-regional pay-operator Viasat. MTV3 will continue its strategy of showing live coverage on its mini-pay channel MTV3 MAX and delayed race coverage on free-to-air.

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

French commercial broadcaster M6 acquired the rights in France for the Irish leg of the play-off for about €4 million from the Irish Football Association, outbidding the Sportfive agency which usually acquires French away matches on behalf of the FFF.

Hong Kong was one of a handful of markets where the league made opening-round awards last time, with PCCW smashing incumbent I-Cable with a $200 million offer.