UK pay-television broadcaster Sky has reportedly held talks with the R&A, which operates the Open championship, over the potential acquisition of rights for the British golf event, according to the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
R&A chief executive Peter Dawson is said to have last week met with Sky managing director Barney Francis at the broadcaster’s headquarters.
UK public-service broadcaster the BBC, a long-term broadcast partner of the Open, has a rights deal for the event that will expire after the 2016 tournament.
However, the Open was recently removed from the list of events protected for free-to-air broadcast, which opens up the potential for deals with pay-television operators.
Recent reports have linked the R&A to a more lucrative deal with Sky after the pay-television broadcaster last year acquired live rights for PGA Tour events until 2022.
However, Dawson in July last year told the Guardian newspaper that reports of a potential deal with Sky were “massively premature”.
“We have had an extremely long relationship with the BBC and a very happy one,” Dawson said at the time. “I think it’s now 59 years since the Open was first televised on the BBC. Our contract runs through [to] the 2016 Open and what will happen thereafter remains to be seen. We obviously have to balance that long-term relationship and the high viewership of the BBC against commercial considerations. The value of golf rights has accelerated dramatically, particularly in the US just in the last 12 months, and that’s perhaps a bigger item in the equation than it might otherwise have been, but it’s massively premature to speculate on what might occur.”