South America

Football: Dutch public-service broadcaster NOS acquired the rights for all 64 matches of football’s 2006 World Cup in a deal with the Infront Sports & Media agency.

Rights are top sports property in SE Asia, and crucial to ESS carriage deals

Argentinian television is getting a more realistic attitude from foreign rights-holders, according to the TyC Sports cable channel

Champions League too expensive, does not attract good audiences, difficult to schedule

German agency Infront Sports agreed a one-year deal for Bundesliga rights with a group comrising EM

Fifty broadcasters around the world will show the tennis’s Masters series this year.

Spanish Primera Liga football club Atletico Madrid opted out of its collective-selling deal with other clubs to sign a €52m (£34m) deal with Audiovisual Sport, the rights-pooling company for pay-opera-ors So…

The revival of the India-Pakistan hockey test series after an interval of five years has attracted high television interest.

The Infront agency has brought in $232 million (£126.6 million/ €182.4 million) from Latin America

Brazil’s four biggest football clubs have refused to ratify a new television rights deal

The Clube dos 13, the body that organises Brazil’s top football championship, the Campeonato Brasileiro, has entered into a partnership with the Brazilian government

The Deutscher Fussball-Bund, the German football federation, signed a five-year extension, ending 2009, to its television rights deal with German public-service broadcasters ARD and ZDF

Olympics: Australian telecoms provider Telstra agreed a A$9m (£4.2m/ €5.3m) deal with Seven Media Group to show exclusive live coverage of the Beijing Olympics on its BigPond mobile service. 

Football: UK commercial broadcaster ITV acquired the rights for the first-choice Champions League match on Wednesdays in a three-year deal with the Team Marketing agency

Football: Greek public-service broadcaster ERT acquired the free-to-air rights for all 31 matches of Euro 2008 in a €9.5m (£6.5m) deal with the Sportfive agency.  It is the first deal done for the championship.  Italian public-service broadcaster Rai is also set to sign a deal for Euro 2008, paying €120m.

The Brazilian government has found that the existing system of selling the television rights for the Campeonato Brasileiro Serie A, is anti-competitive

Biggest rival, Record, willing to pay more than €194 million per season