Irish amateur sports organisation the Gaelic Athletic Association is to target the North American market in its next cycle of media rights sales, according to sports news website TheScore.ie.
The GAA’s current rights cycle will expire in April 2014 and Paraic Duffy, the GAA’s director general, said that making coverage of games more accessible to Irish fans around the world, including North America, would be a key objective.
“There is a big demand from the Irish abroad to see the games and we want to meet that demand,” he said. “We’ve a lot of proposals and we’re talking to a lot of different groups and that’ll go on over the next few months. We need to look at what is the best way to make them accessible and also to monetise the value of the rights as well. But that’s very much a priority over the next six months to bring that to a successful conclusion.”
Duffy added that the launch of the GAA’s ‘Just Play’ app, which offers highlights of games, had helped to identify international demand for Gaelic sports.
“That was just kind of to test the market, to see what kind of interest there was from people. It’s been interesting,” he said. “It was just part of the exploratory process really.”