Football
Uefa drops Octagon from shortlist
Octagon was dealt a fresh blow last week when it was eliminated from the bidding to handle the commercial rights for football’s Uefa Champions League.
World Cup, like the Olympics, excites German TV
All the major German broadcasters are involved in a fierce battle for the television rights for football’s 2006 World Cup in host country Germany.
“A cleaned-up, healthy Germany could be the engine room of the European rights market”
Explosion of competition in Germany for the rights for football’s 2006 World Cup.
Sky Italia’s surprise deals
Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Italia pay-television company astonished experienced industry observers by signing lucrative rights deals with Italy’s top three clubs.
TV RIGHTS CLIPS 1: Football and Olympics
Football: A consortium of pan– Scandinavian free-to-air broadcasters acquired the live and delayed rights for all 64 matches for the 2006 World Cup in a deal with the Infront Sports & Media agency
Loss of exclusivity hit ITV harder than it expected
ITV said that it had probably underestimated the effect that losing exclusivity would have on its coverage.
TV cash is key to election of Lega Calcio president
Italy’s biggest clubs, Juventus and AC Milan, enriched by individually-sold television-rights contracts, have wondered for the last few years how they could get even richer.
New mini-spot ad rules may not appease Brussels
Hope that changes to the rules about the use of mini-spot advertisements during football matches will be enough to appease the European Commission.
League offers live rights to free-TV
The Polish football association will offer free-to-air broadcasters a special package of live rights for six league matches a season
Canal Plus may be better off with no exclusivity
The general wisdom is that the French football league will bring in a record fee at the end of this year
Uefa: ‘Bid for all Europe and you can bid for world’
The tender is for European rights alone, but it states that companies which submit bids for the whole region may also submit bids for the rest of the world.
China’s key role in ABU’s other pan-Asian bids
The ABU, according to the critics, faces an uncertain future
Why Fifa ‘should take regional bid’ from Asian union
The Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) argues that a pan-regional deal for football’s 2010 World Cup has major advantages for Fifa and for the broadcasters.
Malaysia close to low-fee deal
Malaysian commercial broad-caster TV3 is close to signing a deal for the 2006 World Cup
Infront widens French TV talks beyond TF1
The Infront agency is in talks with several broadcasters in France about the 40 matches of the 2006 World Cup
Polish, Hungarian TV resist Infront
Infront, the agency selling the 2006 World Cup rights, is having a hard time getting close to its asking price for the rights in Poland and Hungary
Scandinavia pays €29m in free-TV World Cup boost
A consortium of Scandinavian free-to-air broadcasters this week acquired the rights for football’s 2006 World Cup
Al Jazeera in free-football row
Turkish channel Cine 5 has ended its exclusive television-rights deal for Spanish football’s Primera Liga because the matches are being beamed into the country, unencrypted and free-of-charge, by the Al Jazeera