Italy

An EC decision on the stringent conditions under which Sky Italia is forced to do business will go a long way to determining how the media rights for Serie A football are sold in the next round of deals and how much they are worth.

Rai wants to force a way back into coverage of club basketball after having been out of the picture several years.

Football: England’s Premier League generated £1.782bn (€2.05bn/$2.62bn) in the sale of its domestic live rights for the three-year period from 2010-11 to 2012-13. The deal is a 4.5-pe

Sky Italia’s acquisition of Six Nations rugby rights has prompted calls for Italy’s matches to be added to the list of sports events protected for free-to-air television.

Overall Champions League rights fees in Italy have fallen about 10 per cent, after the Team Marketing agency concluded its sales.

New domestic deals for two of Europe’s top five football leagues accounted for two of the three biggest television rights contracts signed in 2008.

Football: Japanese pay-broadcaster SkyPerfecTV acquired the communication-satellite (CS) rights for all 64 matches of the 2010 World Cup in a deal with the Dentsu agency

Football: Philippines commercial broadcaster ABS-CBN acquired the rights for the 2010 World Cup in a $1m (€750,000) deal with the Football Media Services agency.

Italian state broadcaster Rai has become the only real bidder for free-to-air rights to top sport in the country, forcing down the value of rights even for major football competitions like the Uefa Champions League.

Uefa has paid out an estimated €5 million ($6.4 million) to broadcasters in compensation for the signal blackouts during the Germany-Turkey semi-final in this summer’s Euro 2008 championship.

Spanish television audiences for the 2008 MotoGP season rose for the third year in succession, with young local riders Dani Pedrosa and Jorge Lorenzo both contending for the championship.

Despite the most exciting Formula One season in recent memory, with the driver’s and constructor’s championships going down to the wire, television audiences fell in a number of major European markets.

Football: The African Union of Broadcasters signed a deal with Fifa for the English, French and Portuguese-language television and radio rights to the 2010 World Cup.

The Premier League may offer overseas broadcasters a ready-made Premier League channel in the next three-year rights cycle, as it looks to maintain the steep increase in its international rights revenue in a softening market.

The IOC’s preference for direct relationships in key markets looks set to further loosen the grip of the pan-regional broadcast unions that have traditionally acquired Olympic television rights.

Baseball: US sports network ESPN extended a deal with Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media arm for inter-active television and other digital media rights through to 2013.