Qatari pay-television broadcaster Al Jazeera is closing in on a deal to acquire, or take a controlling stake in, the Mediaset Premium pay-television service of Italian commercial broadcaster Mediaset, according to Italian media sources.
A deal would greatly strengthen the platform ahead of the tender for the domestic media rights for Serie A from the 2015-16 season, which is expected to take place in the coming months.
The broadcaster has been in negotiations for months with Mediaset, the Italian media group owned by the country’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The Il Sole 24 Ore newspaper today reported that Al Jazeera will visit Mediaset’s headquarters in Milan on May 10 to begin due diligence.
The Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper reported that French pay-television group Canal Plus is also looking at taking a stake in the platform.
The organising body of the top division of Italian football, Lega Serie A, is now thought likely to delay its sale of rights until the ownership of Mediaset Premium has been clarified. The league’s media-rights adviser, Infront Sports & Media, is thought to have favoured an early tender, in the wake of Mediaset’s aggressive snatch of the exclusive rights to the Uefa Champions League in Italy for the next three seasons.
A Mediaset Premium owned or backed by Al Jazeera would provide a much stronger challenge to Rupert Murdoch’s pay-television broadcaster Sky Italia for the rights to Serie A.
Currently Sky pays €561m ($774m) per season for the rights to all Serie A matches. Mediaset pays €268m per season for the rights to the matches of the 12 biggest teams.
In each of the last two cycles, the league and Infront created separate packages of rights for satellite (Sky) and digital-terrestrial (Mediaset), which meant that neither broadcaster faced any competition for its rights. This time the league is considering following the model used by most other football leagues: creating separate packages of rights which are sold to the highest bidder, albeit with the rule that no broadcaster can acquire all packages. This would create genuine head-to-head competition in Italy for the first time since the rights were centralised again from the 2010-11 season and could lead to a big increase in value.
The renewal of Infront’s adviser contract is set to be formally approved at Monday’s league assembly. The agency has guaranteed the league a minimum of €980m per season for the three seasons from 2015-16 to 2017-18. If the league brings in €1.04bn per season, Infront’s contract will be renewed for a further three seasons, through to 2020-21.
The return of Canal Plus to the Italian pay-television market would be surprising. The company left the Italian market in 2003 following the sale of its loss-making Telepiù platform to Murdoch, who merged it with his Stream platform to create Sky Italia.