No major leagues are up for renewal this year. This (2019-20) season is the last year of their contract for: - Bundesliga on Fox - La Liga on beINSports - Ligue-1 on beINSports Serie A on ESPN runs through 2020-21 season Premier league on NBC runs through 2021-22 season Not sure of length of contracts on leagues like Eredivisie, LigaNOS, Allsvenskan and some others. At the moment, it's ESPN that is in a buying mood and I hope to see a few of the leagues that currently have no US TV coverage to perhaps make it on their ESPN+ platform. Leagues like Russian Premier League, Austrian Bundesliga, Norwegian Elite. The only other outfit I can see adding one of these smaller leagues is BRLive. SA www.soccertvblog.com
I knew La Liga was up. Didnt know Ligue-1 was also up. TNT/Bleacher Report and ESPN could really go for jugular
Would TNT want Ligue 1 and show one game on TV per week with the rest online like ESPN does for Serie A? TNT has a lot of reruns, and I don't know if they would want live games that won't get many viewers. They would also need studio hosts or at least voices speaking before and after games and during halftime.
I would Imagine they would only televise a handful of PSG games. (If that. ) More than likely they all would be on digital platforms exclusively.
Ligue 1 is going to have ESPN+ written all over it. Though if beIN is going to try to stay in business in the US they will work to retain. Though their entire US operation is completely reliant on retaining La Liga first. And I think they might have a chance to win that because they can offer some cable/sat air time. ESPN will only offer streaming in English, but wonder if they'll want Espanol rights on Deportes. Same with NBC/Telemundo. La Liga need to be wise with this next move (and they don't have a track record for wisdom).
Could La Liga make more money splitting their rights? Let ESPN+ have their English rights with select matchups on ESPN/2/News and Telemundo or Univison getting the Spanish language rights. La Liga seems big on increasing their availability but dont count out BEIN to make them a financial offer to good to turn down
International rights don't exactly work that way. It's not La Liga that sells the rights but rather they make a deal with a marketing agency to sell the rights and La Liga gets a guaranteed amount. For the next 5 seasons, La Liga have given MediaPro the international rights for a guaranteed of €4.48bil. It is MediaPro who then sell the rights to the various markets. While money is the main driver, it often comes down to relationships that an agency may have with providers. beIN was able to garner rights worldwide in the past thanks to not only throwing their money around but by having a great relationship with MP & Silva who acted as agent for La Liga, Serie A and many other competitions. We don't know how good the relationship is between MediaPro and beIN nor ESPN and MediaPro. I'm sure some media insiders have a clue. As for the splitting of language rights, you are probably right that doing so could bring in more revenue to MediaPro but I would argue that splitting the rights could also diminish their value. If you are ESPN or beIN, you really want to control both language rights as you own networks that provide both languages. Knowing your competition will likely broadcast the same match in a different language would certainly make you not want to pay huge bucks for essentially half the rights. Are the 2 separate rights worth more than the whole? Logic would dictate that it should but not sure that it works out that way in the real world. SA www.soccertvblog.com
In the case of the Bundesliga Fox owns the rights yet I've watched games on Univision Deportes. Was this done by Fox who sub-licensed the Spanish language rights to Univision? Rating-wise this doesn't seem to make much sense if both are screening the same match. (Fox Deportes also had matches but it felt like more games were shown on UDEP although I could be wrong.)
Fox owns the English & Spanish rights to Bundesliga. They sublicensed 3 matches per round to Univision. Which matches depends on the sublicensing agreement. What it looked like was that Univision Deportes and Fox Deportes would alternate weekly as to which matches they would take.(that's what it looked like based on Bayern Munich matches which seemed to go back and forth between the 2 Spanish networks). It could be something like in odd number rounds, UDN has 1st choice; Fox has choices 2 & 3; UDN 4; etc. Fox Deportes also showed 3 matches per round on their channel (obviously different matches than UDN). When there were occasional Monday matches, they seem to fall to Fox Deportes which then had 4. Why do this? Money. It's really an easy way for Fox to recoup some of the expense of purchasing the rights. Yes, if they are showing Bayern on FS1 at the same time UDN are showing them, they would obviously lose some eyeballs to them but I guess the amount of money they received from sublicensing made up for any ad revenue loss due to lower ratings. SA www.soccertvblog.com
I was going to post to see if there were many changes for the upcoming season, but I think it's all the same (at least for the major ones)
Yep, just FOX grabbing the Santos Laguna home games for Liga MX and San Luis/Juarez home games will be picked up by UDN for Liga MX
Seeing that FoxSports 1/2 showed Tijuana & Monterrey matches last season, I would expect to see Santos matches there too. Although I do not see the opening match (July 21st) on either english-language network... SA www.soccertvblog.com
This was news to me...Russian Premier League is FREE on the official YouTube League channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfO4uULWZvEtCCj-lw1ZO5A Sunday, July 14th matches to check out: - Krylya Sovetov vs CSKA Moskva (9:30am ET) - Zenit vs Tambov (12pm ET) Looks like we get 4 matches per round. SA www.soccertvblog.com
They've done this already last season. No English commentary tho. Just crowd noise which I don't like much of that...
After Copa america and WWC , I could do w/o commentary for a while. But good news about the RPL. Something to watch from Europe during the summers.
There is a better place to post this, there's a long-running GolTV thread: https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/the-future-of-gol-tv.1973000/
Great, thanks. Given that it was dormant for 6 months, I guess I missed it. Will re-post there and delete my above.
I have not seen this posted anywhere around here but it seems like beIN has licensed their Spanish 2nd tier games to Azteca America of all networks.
Yes they sub license a couple of games per weekend (some of the others wind up on connect or even on BeIN TV on international weekends). It began late last season.
For all of those have have asked about my website - again, thanks for your concern when I "disappeared" for a while. As I mentioned in another thread, I no longer live in the US so I no longer create the listings that we have all become accustomed to. I know the current website may be a far cry from what you are use to but I have now come up with a design that I hope many will still find useful. If I had anything in the past that was "special" it was links to broadcaster's websites in order to update my listings. So I figured I would use that resource and share it with the new design. As you click on any event in the Calendar, you will have a US TV listing page as well as a World TV listing page. There you will find which broadcasters show a specific event and links that will take you to their website and give you all the details you need to watch any specific match. (Bare with me as I finish updating and placing the links on the event pages for the rest of November). Again, thanks for all of your support in the past and if you have any suggestions or comments on the new design, don't hesitate to throw them my way. SA www.soccertvblog.com PS. There will be constant updated news articles about broadcasting right's and related subjects on the site. Hope you find them useful as well.
Thanks for doing this SA. Now that my club has fallen in prestige, and to obscure Europa League slots, it's been a bit more challenging to see them live. Often I've found them on Telemundo/Univision/Gala channels but I don't get much advance notice of which games they're showing. Don't know if that's because of late decisions by TUDN or my cable guide being late in getting updates. So I've found myself using www.livesoccertv.com but I'm not sure if they're any better than what you offer, or plan to offer.
I have found livesoccertv to be very reliable and accurate. I can also recommend an app called "Live Sports TV Listings Guide". You can download at the App store (I use Android. Not sure if there is an iPhone version). Their icon is a soccer ball across a TV screen (blue). Once you set your preferences, it's an amazing app I use for worldwide TV info on soccer matches. TUDN and Univision in general can be late but the links I provided should be good at least 2-3 days before kickoff. SA