UK pay-television broadcaster BSkyB has renewed its rights for all major International Cricket Council tournaments in a three-year deal starting this autumn and running until 2015.
The rights are for exclusive live coverage of the tournaments. The deal was agreed with Asian pay-television broadcaster ESPN Star Sports, the ICC’s global media rights distribution partner.
The first competition to be covered by the deal will be the World Twenty20 tournament in Sri Lanka this September, and the rights will also cover the Cricket World Cup, Champions Trophy and Women’s Cricket World Cup national team tournaments.
The deal was announced as Sky reported strong financial results for the first quarter of 2012, despite a slowdown in UK pay-television subscriber growth. The company added 15,000 pay-television subscribers in the quarter to March 31, down from 51,000 in the same quarter last year. The slowing UK economy was blamed. Sky now has 10.3 million pay-television subscribers.
Sky reported a 5-per-cent increase in revenues in the nine months to March 31, to £5.1 billion (€6.2 billion/$8.2 billion), and a 15-per-cent increase in adjusted operating profit to £908 million.
Sky chief executive Jeremy Darroch sought to distance the company from its biggest shareholder, the News Corporation media conglomerate, amid fears that a UK parliamentary report into the “phone hacking” scandal at News Corp-owned newspapers could endanger the broadcaster’s licence.
It has been suggested that UK media regulator Ofcom could force News Corp to cut its 39-per-cent stake in Sky following the publication of the report, which said that News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch was “not a fit person” to oversee a major international company.
“I would emphasise that it’s important to remember that Sky and News Corporation are separate companies,” Darroch said. “We believe that Sky’s track record as a broadcaster is the most important factor in determining our fitness to hold a licence.”