Canadian public-service broadcaster CBC cancelled its deal to broadcast the country’s Grand Slam curling circuit to leave the series without a domestic broadcast partner just days before its next event.
CBC has been the sole broadcaster of the Canadian series for the past four years, but the Globe and Mail reported that iSport Media and Management, the Grand Slam’s organiser, is now in talks with cable-television channel Rogers Sportsnet about providing television coverage for the series. The next event is on January 25.
No reason was given for the separation but, according to several reports, CBC terminated the agreement after accusing iSport of failing to fulfil payments to the broadcaster.
iSport chief executive Kevin Albrecht admitted there had been a dispute about money owed to the CBC, but denied that outstanding fees were due to the broadcaster.
“We’ve been negotiating with them for nine months now,” he said. “We have a lot of issues about the quality of the broadcasts and we thought it was getting stale and not up to the standards we’d expect. We’ve talked to them about this for some time.”
CBC’s deal had covered the semi-finals and finals of each of the four annual Grand Slam curling events.
The broadcaster is set to be without curling on its schedule this year for the first time since 1962. It lost the rights to the men’s and women’s national championships to TSN, the Canadian sports broadcaster majority-owned by the Bell Media group, in 2008.