Telco Orange has widened its sports offering for the 2020-21 season by signing a deal to offer LaLigaSportsTV, the linear channel and OTT service owned and operated by LaLiga, the governing body of Spanish football’s top two divisions.
LaLigaSportsTV will be available on Orange’s linear and digital television platforms.
The service was launched as a free, live and on-demand portal to a range of sports, including some LaLiga content, to boost their exposure worldwide.
Among the sports properties available for the coming season on LaLigaSportsTV are the Superbike World Cup and the Tinkoff Russian Premier League. The platform boasts more then 30 sports in total.
LaLiga has sought various deals to boost the exposure and accessibility of LaLigaSportsTV in the past year. These have included a carriage deal with Samsung for its Android TV operating system which is included on all of the tech firm’s Smart TVs.
By mid-January, 600,000 registered users were viewing content on LaLigaSportsTV.
Around €7.5m ($8.9m) had been invested in the platform as of September 2019, comprised of €4m for content acquisition and €3.5m for IT infrastructure.
The deal with Orange does not include access to the top and second tier football leagues for the coming season, though the telecoms operator will broadcast these through a separate sublicensing agreement it already has in place with rival telco Telefónica. Orange will pay Telefónica €300m for non-exclusive rights to both LaLiga and the Uefa Champions League and Europa League competitions during the 2020-21 season.
Telefónica currently holds the rights to the Uefa Champions and Europa Leagues in the current cycle which ends after the coming season. The telco has renewed the rights through the 2021-24 cycle with an expanded inventory that includes the newly-created third-tier Europa Conference League.
The telco holds the domestic rights to LaLiga for the 2019-20 to 2021-22 cycle, paying about €980m per season.