Pay-television broadcaster Al Jazeera announced the acquisition of rights for the 2012 Olympics as it unveiled its sports rights portfolio for its new French channels.
The channels – BeIN Sport 1, which will launch on June 1, and BeIN Sport 2, which will launch on July 28 – will mainly focus on football, but their director general Charles Biétry emphasised that they would not only cater for football fans.
“Sixteen sports are part of the line-up including athletics, basketball, handball and volleyball,” he said.
The broadcaster has secured live rights for the handball, basketball and tennis competitions at the 2012 Olympic Games. It will build up to London 2012 by showing the women’s Olympic basketball qualifying tournament, which will take place from June 25 to July 1 in Ankara, Turkey.
Other non-football rights include the French women’s handball championship; boxing rights under a deal with promoter Golden Boy; rugby union from the Celtic League; rugby league from the English Super League and Australian National Rugby League; volleyball from the men’s and women’s World Championships; and the beach volleyball World Tour.
BeIN Sport’s football rights are its strongest content. Its channels will offer eight live matches per week from the French Ligue 1, as well as coverage of the Uefa Champions League and Europa League, and all matches from Euro 2012 and Euro 2016. BeIN Sport has also secured rights to the German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A, Spanish Liga, Spanish cup, English Football League, English League Cup, the South American Copa Libertadores and Copa Sudamericana, and World Cup 2014 qualification matches featuring South American teams, and the Scotland and Netherlands teams.
A subscription to both channels will cost €11 ($14) a month. Distributors will offer promotional offers of two- or three-month free subscriptions with no obligation to renew. The channels will be available on all French cable and IPTV platforms, including Numericable, Alice, Bouygues Telecom, DartyBox, Free, Orange and SFR. Satellite platforms Orange Sat, SFR Sat, Bis and Parabole Réunion will also carry the channels. Biétry said the channels will have a potential reach of 14 million homes at launch.
In addition to live and delayed sport, the channels’ schedules will also include magazine-style programming, some of which will be shown unencrypted.
Le Figaro reports that a window between 6am and 9am, along with two further slots around noon and in the evening will be given over to unencrypted programming. This will allow for the sale of advertising, although the channels’ main source of revenue will be subscriptions. Al-Khelaifi said: “We will recruit as many subscribers as we can and as quickly as possible.”
BeIN Sport has recruited 160 staff ahead of its launch, including 58 sports journalists.