American football’s NFL has agreed rights deals with pay-television broadcaster ESPN across Australia and New Zealand and commercial broadcaster Seven in Australia.
Seven’s deal with the league will run for five years, from 2014-15 to 2018-19, but the length of ESPN’s multi-year deal was not disclosed.
Seven will show three games in a row on Sundays and digital-terrestrial channel 7mate will broadcast live coverage of the Monday Night Football game. Seven will also broadcast live coverage of the NFL Playoffs and the Super Bowl championship game as well as the season-opener and Thanksgiving Day match-ups plus magazine programmes.
Under the deal, which includes online rights, Seven will serve as the NFL.com website’s digital advertising representative in Australia and will also promote the NFL Game Pass digital subscription product in the country.
ESPN will show three live regular-season games every week, including 17 Sunday Night Football games, 17 Monday Night Football games, 16 Thursday Night Football games and one Thanksgiving Day game, as well as the Playoffs, the Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl.
ESPN will also make the NFL Red Zone service available on ESPN2 every Sunday. The service automatically takes viewers to key incidents around the different games.