United Kingdom

Basketball: Brazilian commercial broadcaster Globo is to acquire the rights for the new, top-flight domestic basketball league, Novo Basquete Brasil, for R$1.5m (€474,000/ $633,710) a season.

Diminishing interest in athletics has resulted in the sport’s national governing body being forced to accept a significant reduction in rights fees in renewing its deal with public-service broadcaster the BBC.

Channel Four’s decision to drop its coverage of the alpine skiing, snowboarding and Nordic World Cups has drawn strong criticism from both the sports and television production sectors.

European club competition the Heineken Cup last week became the third rugby union rights property in the last month to secure a healthy rise in rights fees from the UK television market.

The court date set for this month that was to rule, once and for all, on the ownership of television rights to Spain’s football Liga has been postponed by at least six months, to next June or July.

Athletics: UK public-service broad-caster the BBC extended its deal for domestic athletics events for a further six years, from 2009 to 2014

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.

Analysts are reining in their forecasts of the value of the next English Premier League live rights deal, on the basis that regulatory intervention and the economic downturn will limit competition.

The efforts of sports rights holders to protect the exclusivity of their broadcast deals from ‘pirate’ live transmissions were given a boost last week by the UK’s High Court.

Olympics: Turkish commercial network Fox Turkey acquired the rights for the 2014 and 2016 Olympic Games.

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.

UK pay-operator BSkyB’s new five-year deal with the Rugby Football Union was a classic smash-and-grab move that will strengthen its position in the ongoing negotiations for English rugby union’s top-tier domestic league.

Forthcoming negotiations for the domestic rights for English rugby union’s Guinness Premiership will act as an interesting barometer of the state of the UK sports rights market, three months before the start of football’s Premier League rights talks.