North America’s Major League Baseball is close to renewing rights deals with US network Fox and cable-television broadcaster Turner Broadcasting System, according to the Wall Street Journal newspaper.
The report said that the rights would cover regular-season and post-season games and would be worth nearly $7 billion (€5.4 billion) over eight years, from 2014 to 2021.
Fox would retain exclusive rights to the season-ending World Series, but will share coverage of the earlier playoff games with pay-television broadcaster ESPN.
When the deals are combined with ESPN’s recent acquisition of US and international rights for $5.6 billion over the same period, the league will double its rights income in the next cycle, the newspaper said.
Fox pays an average of $257.1 million per year in its current deal, while Turner currently pays an average of $148.6 million per year.
The NBC Sports division of the NBC network was interested in acquiring MLB rights at an earlier point in the latest sales talks, but has withdrawn.