Five broadcast deals have been agreed in the Asia-Pacific region for the semi-finals and final of the 2020 Canadian Elite Basketball League Summer Series tournament.
The agreements were struck by Mediapro Canada, an arm of the international production and media-rights agency.
The quintet of new rights deals announced today (Friday) include the acquisition of rights by Australian pay-television broadcaster Fox Sports.
Malaysian pay-television broadcaster Astro has also signed off on a rights agreement, as has Singtel, the Singaporean telco that will show the action on its mioSports channels.
TapGo, the cable sports broadcaster and free-to-view sports app, has picked up rights in the Philippines and CSTV Group-owned digital broadcaster Sportscast will show the matches in Taiwan.
The international distribution of the 26-game CEBL Summer Series competition, which concludes on Sunday, has been supplemented by worldwide streaming on Twitch, the Amazon-owned online streaming platform.
Twitch recently made its most significant move yet in ‘traditional’ sports with the creation of a standalone sports vertical, while also finalising a quartet of content deals with leading European football clubs. The sports category also features action from the NBA G-League, Australia’s NBL and Brazil’s Novo Basquete.
Mediapro is producing every game of the CEBL Summer Series with seven of those fixtures aired live by Canadian public broadcaster CBC’s linear channel. All games will also be available live and on-demand via CBC GEM, the broadcaster’s OTT platform.
Mediapro Canada is using its AutomaticTV artificial intelligence production system to for the host broadcast of high-definition coverage of the 19 CBC GEM games not shown by CBC’s linear channels. It marks the first time Mediapro has used this technology in Canada, having previously exploited it throughout European broadcasts.