Irish telecommunications company Eir is considering launching a new free-to-air sports channel.
Eir acquired pay-television broadcaster Setanta Sports in December of last year, marking its entrance into the television market.
Richard Moat, chief executive of Eir, told the Irish Examiner newspaper that a free-to-air channel is something that Setanta “may have to do one day” in order to compete for a broader range of rights. Moat added that the new channel could target competitive matches involving the Republic of Ireland’s national football team.
Setanta Sports already has rights to the national team's friendly matches, including the game tonight (Friday) between Ireland and the Netherlands.
Setanta Sports also has a host of other rights in Ireland, including live English Premier League football, every Uefa Champions League game and exclusive Europa League matches, as well as the English FA Cup.
“Obviously, we’re up against big competitors who’ve got exclusive sports content and so getting that for Eir for the first time and continuing to expand the range of content we have is going to be a key part of that strategy in the future," Moat said.
“I think we’ve watched the evolution of [UK pay-television broadcaster] BT Sport with interest and what they’ve done with it and obviously there’s a kind of crossover there because we’ve got that exclusive agreement with BT to have the rights to BT Sport in the Republic of Ireland through until 2019 so that’s a well-trodden path now and it’s one which we would like to emulate if we can with Eir.
“I think now we’ve got Setanta, we have to keep acquiring sports rights to keep it alive… building on the areas where Setanta already has a presence. You’ve got to be realistic; we’re not going to start slugging it out with BT and [UK pay-television broadcaster] Sky because we’re not in that league. Sometimes the rights to the Republic of Ireland can be a lot more reasonable than you would think so there’s a lot to play for there.”