Tag: Sport
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Sporting Value
The new Premier League season is well under way, and it’s at this time of year that the big sports TV players tend to gather up their marketing spends and splash the cash around, trying to persuade those of us who don’t subscribe that we really should be. BT Sport has an entertaining video of…
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Sexist Coverage of the World Cup
No, I am not talking about Patrice Evra’s applauding of fellow ITV pundit and England footballer Eniola Aluko (nor his muttered “no clapping” moan in a subsequent match). Nor am I talking about the various people who are upset that women deign to commentate on a football match. (Incidentally, “Remote Controller” in the new issue…
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Televising The World Cup Around the World
Two media stories which have interested me a lot about the World Cup so far. In the UK, we’re fortunate to still have Ofcom’s Listed Events. This is a list of sports events that are considered national events, and must be available to audiences free-to-air. Despite various attempts to either redefine the list, or scrap…
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Premier League TV Rights – 2019-2022
The new Premier League TV rights auction for the UK has just got under way, with bids due in at the end of January, and the results announced in early February. Such are the scale of these rights now, that the announcement tends to be made to accommodate the stock market. If a PLC is…
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Free to Air Cricket
Today brings some interesting news, with the ECB actually allowing some free-to-air cricket on TV screens in the future. The BBC has done a deal to see the return of cricket to its channels for the first time since 1999. You will recall that in 1998, Channel 4 secured the rights to most international cricket,…
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Sky Sports Revamp
Sky Sports is reportedly getting a bit of a makeover, losing the numbered channels currently known as Sky Sports 1-5, and instead gaining sports-specific channels. Currently the channels are roughly being used as follows: Sky Sports 1 – Football Sky Sports 2 – Cricket, Rugby, Football Sky Sports 3 – Football, Tennis Sky Sports 4…
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BT/UEFA Rights Deal
Last week, BT Chief Executive Gavin Patterson was reported as saying that “rampant inflation in sports rights” had to end. Today we learn that BT is going to pay £394m a season for UEFA Champions’ League and Europa League rights from the 2018/19 season, up from £299m a season under the previous agreement. By my…
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An Egregiously Bad Chart
The chart above is screen-grabbed from an otherwise excellent ITV4 documentary called When Football Changed the World. It looked at the state of the game as the old First Division broke away to form the Premier League at the end of the 80s and start of the 90s. It interviewed plenty of key figures from…
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My Problem with Reporting of the Fancy Bears Hack
There is much wrong in the world of sport, including doping. Intrinsically most sports bodies are placed in tough positions, often at odds with their own self-interests. Should a sport admit to a doping problem when it may damage its own future? Then there’s WADA – the World Anti-Doping Authority. It has an ineffectual leader…
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Euro 2016 – Staying on TV
As Euro 2016 kicks off in France tonight, my inbox has become flooded with nonsense PR stories. My email address has recently been sold to a number of PR agencies and I get a wide variety of emails asking me if I’m interested in writing about things I’m not interested in writing about. I silently…
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Live Football on the Radio
No, I’m not writing about the new Premier League contracts for UK radio. They do seem a bit overdue though, and I’m slightly sad that Absolute Radio has made clear that it’s not bidding for live coverage from next season. So I expect some kind of carve up between Five Live and Talksport, with Talksport…
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F1 to Follow Cricket Into Obscurity
Here’s how F1 and Bernie Ecclestone do business: 21 December 2015 – Channel 4 wins terrestrial rights to Formula 1, after the BBC hands them back. There was rumoured to be a fight with ITV for them. Bernie Ecclestone, Chief Executive Officer of the Formula One group said: “I am sorry that the BBC could…