The Badminton World Federation (BWF), the sport’s global governing body, has agreed a worldwide rights distribution deal with the IMG Media agency.
Under the four-year agreement, which will start with the 2014 World Superseries and run until the end of 2017, IMG Media will sell centralised media rights for the governing body’s various championships as well as the Superseries and Grand Prix Gold events.
The governing body said that its media rights earnings would “jump fourfold” as a result of the agreement, which marks the first time that the BWF has worked exclusively with one global agency across all of its rights properties.
“Of course, BWF is keen to extend its live and delayed coverage of tournaments into new markets,” BWF president Kang Young Joong said. “Additionally, we will be considering how we can continue to exploit broadband technologies and use data to interact with and engage fans more. We are also looking at an enhanced magazine show, profiling badminton stars and events more prominently. There are many options for utilising media platforms and BWF will be seeking to maximise these.”
The BWF events are currently broadcast in 160 countries worldwide.