Yesterday, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) announced that from the end of February, Eurosport as a brand would no longer exist in the UK. All its programming would be wrapped into TNT Sports. From my perspective, this particularly impacts on how I watch cycling, a sport to which Eurosport has the vast majority of rights.
But I do have some questions/concerns:
- For many sport-specific fans (e.g. cycling or winter sports), it looks like a subscription is going to get more expensive. You may already have access to Eurosport via a lower-tier on a service like Sky or Virgin Media. When Eurosport goes, you’ll lose that access and will need to pay for a tier that includes TNT Sports.
TNT Sports charges a relatively high premium because it has pricey sports like Premier League football and UEFA Champions League football. So you’ll have to pay that fee, regardless of whether you want those expensive sports.
The cost. I pay for TNT Sports, for UEFA Champions’ League football as much as anything, but it’s expensive. As a standalone, it costs £30.99 a month for Premium including TNT Sports. Previously there had been a £6.99 a month package that included Eurosport’s sport offering, but not the TNT Sports offering. But that tier has gone now. It’s all sports or nothing. If you’re a cycling fan that isn’t interested in football/rugby union/Moto GP, then there’s a massive price hike. Recall that back when there was a GCN subscription, you could sometimes pay as little as £30 a year for all your cycling. Now that won’t get you a month’s worth.
There are, and no doubt will be various offers around. For example, EE subscribers may be able to get a package with their phone or broadband plans. Now TV (the streaming version of Sky) always has offers for its sports. Right now, I can see that it’s £26 a month for six months’ of Now TV Sports, compared with the regular price of £34.95 a month. And yes, this does mean that sports fans are facing £65.94 a month for Sky/TNT’s combined offerings without special offers. And that’s before you factor in sport that’s found elsewhere like Amazon, DAZN, Premier Sports or others. And the way things are going, in the future that may well include Netflix which already has “sports-adjacent” WWE in the UK.
I’m also left wondering how much Max including Sports will be when it launches in the UK. £40-50 a month? In the US Max Ultimate Ad-Free costs $20.99 a month with a $9.99 a month upcharge for B/R Sports add-on which includes sports carried by channels such as TNT and TBS. But WBD’s sports offering in the US is vastly inferior to its UK offering. - “Linear” TV will have less choice than currently. As someone who already pays for TNT Sport, via my Sky satellite service, I can hop between TNT Sports 1-4 and Eurosport 1-2. That’s six channels, plus a few more hidden behind the red button (although these are often in lowly SD). It doesn’t sound like Eurosport 1-2 are becoming TNT Sports 5-6. They’re just going and the sport is being shuffled around channels.
At certain times, that’s not a problem. There is a lot of space especially on TNT Sports 3-4 at many times of the day. They re-run a lot of football and play filler magazine programmes to eat up the time. But there are busy times when already every channel is “full” of live sport. I suspect that some fans of TNT Sports’ more esoteric offerings may find that downhill skiing has displaced, say, TNT’s badminton coverage onto a digital platform.
Obviously, there’s not necessarily going to be a reduction in sports covered, but firing up the Discovery+ app will become more necessary. - Currently, cycling fans are treated to advertising free coverage of events if they watch via “digital” – i.e. Discovery+ (or Max in other territories). I hope it’s not the case, but I can see this disappearing when the shift to TNT Sports branding happens. I’ve seen zero mention of it, and advertising is becoming increasingly important to channel providers. Other sports on TNT Sports don’t get the “ad-free on digital” treatment.
- Channel hopping becomes harder. In the “old” days, when a fixture was a bit boring, or there were two sports taking place simultaneously, you might flick between Eurosport 1 and Sky Sports Main Event/BBC1/ITV1/wherever. From one click on my remote, I could dart to and from the different sports easily, sticking with one for a bit before jumping back. In the streaming world, where more sport is watched via an app, the harder this becomes. It’s a quiet day at the Tour de France, but what’s happening at Wimbledon? Exit the app. “Do you really want to exit?” Aargh! Yes. Jump into another app. Wait for it to load. Load the live sport. Buffering… Watch. Wait, there’s been a crash at the Tour de France? Exit the app… Rinse and repeat.
It was a certainty that WBD had to streamline their sports brands. On cycling coverage we would hear Eurosport, TNT Sports, Discovery+ and Max all mentioned, because in different parts of the world, they have different sports brands, but the same commentary is carried everywhere. This thins out one brand, and when Max has fully rolled out in major markets like the UK in 2026, then Discovery+ will disappear too. That’s because it’ll really only exist for diehards who only want to watch reality shows and programme made by former Top Gear presenters. Max will have that, plus HBO shows (some shared with Sky), TNT Sports as the umbrella for all its sports and hopefully a fairly deep catalogue of older stuff if the US version is anything to go by. But it’ll all be at a price.
I should also note that recent reports suggest that TNT Sports is in the running for Six Nations rugby, although they’ve publicly noted issues surrounding rights in Wales and Ireland make the commercial argument challenging. Recall that the Six Nations got lots of investment from CVC Capital Partners in return for a one seventh stake in the tournament. They will want a return on that investment.
The Six Nations is a Category B “Listed Event” in the UK, meaning that live coverage does not have to be made available live free-to-air, but highlights do. This is a particularly sore point in Wales, where there has been a great deal of effort to get the Six Nations moved up to Category A where it would sit alongside the likes of the World Cup and the FA Cup in having to be free-to-air. Rugby union is culturally very important in Wales often considered its national sport (even if perhaps more people play football).
Welsh language channel S4C often carries simulcasts of fixtures involving Welsh rugby teams, even when the English language broadcast rights are subscription only (e.g. the Autumn Internationals in 2024 were on TNT Sports, but you could watch Wales’ fixtures in Welsh on S4C free-to-air).
In Ireland, their List of Designated Events only includes the Six Nations being available on a deferred basis (i.e. broadcast in full “as live” some time after the event). But last year, the Irish government was looking to add a number of sports, including the Six Nations, to an updated list, meaning Ireland’s games in the Six Nations would have to be broadcast free-to-air. It’s unclear when or if this amended list will be enacted.
All this means that were the Six Nations go exclusively to TNT Sports, it’s entirely possible that Ireland would make the games available free-to-air, and the Welsh government would also be very upset.
As things stand the Six Nations is split between the BBC (Wales and Scotland’s home games) and ITV (England, Ireland, France and Italy’s home games). If as reports suggest, that the BBC can’t afford to renew, I can envisage a world where TNT Sports and ITV split the games. TNT Sports would just have to continue to allow Welsh language coverage of Wales’ games on S4C and free-to-air access to Ireland’s games in Ireland.
I think ITV will find the value of Guinness and banks’ advertising worthwhile enough to bid for continued coverage. But also, as I’ve written before, if rugby union largely disappears from free-to-air screens in England, then the sport will be the long-term loser.
The Six Nations is basically all there is now on free-to-air TV in England, aside from the quadrennial World Cup. All the Netflix docuseries in the world (Nope – I’ve never watched Full Contact on Netflix, but I know it’s there), won’t get kids into it. Without ITV coverage, you can actually envisage a landscape where there are more NFL games on free-to-air British TV than rugby union games!