Alain Béral, president of La Ligue Nationale de Basket, the French basketball league, said he was not satisfied by the level of exposure the league is getting in its existing domestic rights deal with pay-television broadcaster Canal Plus.
Béral told Le Parisien that it was “not enough” to have the league broadcast on the Canal Plus Sport pay-television channel. “Canal Plus does a good editorial job of covering basketball but I’m not satisfied about the exposure of our national league,” Béral said. “I want exposure and visibility on unencrypted channels.”
Béral has had discussions with public-service broadcaster France Télévisions and pay-television broadcaster Al Jazeera as well as Canal Plus about the next domestic rights cycle for the Pro A and Pro B leagues – the top two divisions of French basketball. Canal Plus pays €4 million ($5.1 million) per year in the existing deal, which started in 2008 and will expire in June 2013.
Béral said he wanted to make basketball as accessible to as many people as possible by securing more exposure on digital-terrestrial-television channels and creating magazines.