Guardian: ESPN and Setanta to team up against FSC for US PL Rights

I remember those days. I think it went like this:

Saturday:
7:45 AM was on FSC, although the broadcast window was from 7:30 AM to 10 AM.
The 10 AM game on FSC was a delayed German game.
The 10 AM EPL game was on PPV, but my pub didn't have a cover fee. (Nice.)
The 12 PM EPL game was live
At 2:30, I believe they had paid programming
At 3 PM, I believe they aired the other game which was live at 10 AM ET.

Sunday:
The 11 AM game was on PPV, but free to viewers at pubs. This game was on FSC as FanZone, aired on Thursday nights at 11:30 (I think) PM ET.
At 1 PM, we had a delayed showing of the 8 AM game.

I think the Monday game was on FSC. (Strangely enough, I don't think there is a Monday game ANYWHERE these days.)


Games on FSC used to trickle down to the FSN channels. I think it was usually the 7:45 AM ET game that would be re-aired on FSN usually Tuesday afternoons ET. I remember watching that game from 12-2, then Champions League games at 2:30.

 

Yep. So on Sundays, FSC deliberately didn't show the early Sunday game (which was often a good one) because of stupid PPV, instead generally showing infomercials.

It's on Setanta (on the weeks there is one). Since Setanta produces it themselves, there's usually an hour pre-game plus some post game analysis.

 

don't forget about the Eredivisie game thrown in there somewhere.

I do remember that around 2003 one of the PPV games was rebroadcast on delay a few days into the week.

The FSN games were (and for the most part still are) Tuesdays at noon - and it was how I knew there was a Fox Sports World that I could order.

 

The post game, it seems, is usually pushed back onto Football Matters - which follows the game in the UK, but is delayed to 9:30pm ET on Setanta US

 

Ahh, the good old days. In Canada it was even better as the PPV games were on Fox Sports World.

 

The landscape of American sports coverage in this part of the world is too complicated to say that ESS gets the feed from ESPN Pac Rim.

In this part of the world, we have a variety of American sports. Some games are produced by ESPN, some are not. On the other hand, some ESPN produced games will end up on ESS, while some will end up on other stations.

For example, ESPN Latin America/International usually televise two NFL games: the Sunday Nite and Monday Nite games. But ESS lost the rights of those two games two years ago. In Hong Kong, NowTV grabbed those two games since the 2007 season, but it's been distributed by ASN (a new venture All Sports Network). Yet one of those game (the Monday Nite one) was produced in the U.S. by ESPN.

Take the NBA. ESS televises 3 games/week, sometimes they get the feed from TNT, sometimes from ESPN (the Friday Nite game on ESPN), sometimes from the regional sports networks. It's not a deal between ESS and ESPN International, it's a deal between ESS and the NBA. For example, this coming Friday:

ESPN USA will televise two NBA games: Mavs X Rockets and Hornets X Lakers
ESPN Latin America and PacRim will televise one of them: Hornets X Lakers
ESPN Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, China etc.) will televise none of these two, but Raptors X Knicks, a game produced by TSN and MSG.
However, the Hornets X Lakers game, a marquee game, will be picked up by Star Sports Taiwan and an OTA station in Hong Kong.
The Mavs X Rockets game will be picked up by China's CCTV5 (the Yao Ming factor).

 

Even before Disney made its offer to purchase Capital Cities Inc. (which owned ABC and 80% of ESPN, Inc.) in 1995, ESPN, Inc. entered into a joint venture agreement with NewsCorp's STAR TV unit to merge the operations of ESPN Asia (which was produced in Bristol, Connecticut at the time) and STAR TV's Prime Sports (which was renamed STAR Sports) in Hong Kong.

The joint venture, ESPN STAR Sports Limited (ESS), would operate out of a new TV production center in Singapore where the Singaporean government granted ESS tax benefits because the Singaporean government wanted to build a regional pay cable/satellite television production/transmission hub for the entire region.

(CNBC would eventually move its Asia Pacific operations from Hong Kong to Singapore after CNBC merged its Asian operations with a Singapore-based business news channel for the same tax benefit reason.)

ESPN, Inc. and NewsCorp/STAR TV formed ESS for two reasons: 1) to form what amounts to a cartel in order to keep sports rights fee to a minimum, and 2) to prevent governments such as China from playing the two companies against each other as they try to lobby for "landing rights".

(ESS was not granted "landing rights" to offer ESPN China to the masses in Mainland China until the 4th quarter of 2005, more than 10 years after ESS was formed. STAR Sports is still not available to the masses in China because the Chinese government have to protect government-owned sports channels such as CCTV 5 and the provincial/city-government owned sports channels.)

The ESS joint venture was initially managed by ESPN Asia Limited personnel with then ESPN Asia Limited president Alexander "Sandy" Brown heading ESS.

By 1997, NewsCorp would install its managers to run ESS. All ESS personnel who came from ESPN Asia Limited, including Mr. Brown and all the on-air talent who came from ESPN side of the joint venture, were purged from ESS.

(Indeed, those ESPN Asia Mandarin-Chinese on-air talent and production personnel who relocated from Bristol, Connecticut to Singapore during the summer of 1996 would find themselves unemployed a year later.)

ESPN Inc. still holds a 50% equity stake in ESS, but ESPN personnel hasn't been involved in the day-to-day operation of ESS since 1997.

ESPN, Inc. continues to license the "ESPN", "SportsCenter" and "X Games" trademarks, the on-air graphics look, the ESPN "speed" font, and the rights to operated X Games events in Asia to ESS.

If you have ever watched SportsCenter Asia (which is produced by ESS in Singapore), you would have noticed that you were watching a show that is structured similar to Sky Sports News in the UK, but with the ESPN on-air graphics look.

The reporters on SportsCenter Asia do not ever use the letters "ESPN" to identify themselves. They will sign off each package with "reporting from (location), this is (name of reporter) for SportsCenter."

 

FSC could get the Arsenal TV, Liverpool TV, Man U Tv and Chelsea TV rights...
Remember when GolTV had the Arsenal TV rights ? Every monday we got to see the Arsenal game. Of course now they don't have it anymore and in any case they dropped from DISH Network so....

 

Both games were rebroadcast...the Sat. 10 am game was shown at 8 pm Tuesday nights and the Sunday 11 am game was shown at 8 pm Wednesday nights. (Once in a while, due to a live night match, the airtime was moved forward to 5pm).

The last year they had the Sunday 11 am PPV match, at the end of the season one Sunday, with both Sunday games having Championship importance, FSC at the last minute moved the initial showing of the 8:30 am game to LIVE, and you knew changes were coming the following season.

 

I think there's a rule in which each TV channel (Setanta, GolTV, FSC) can only show programming from two teams. I think there was a time when Man U and Chelsea were on Setanta, and FSC had Milan TV and something else. That was pretty nice because it translated into FSC showing "Milan in Europe" which was a UEFA CL game from the previous 24-48 hours.

 

The Sunday 11 AM game was also aired as EPL Fan Zone on Thursday late night.

We probably ended up with a better deal out of this now, as the 11 AM game is still Fan Zone, but it usually seems to air on Tuesday nights. (At least it did when I last checked.)

Tuesday nights is a lot better. The game is still fairly fresh, and if one of the teams in that game has a CL game that same week, it was very strange watching the CL game before Fan Zone. (I would try to avoid the score of the Sunday 11 AM game and watch Fan Zone without knowing anything about that game.)

 

MUTV and Chelsea TV are on Setanta North America. I vaguely remember someone from Setanta saying that there is a rule about carrying programming from two clubs. I was never clear on who made the rule. The Premier League? What's the point of a rule like that?

GolTV showed Arsenal TV and LFC TV, but now that Setanta produces them, they might not want to sell them to a competitor.

 

Probably the Premier League. They could enforce the rule on either international TV rights bidders in those contracts or with the UK distributors. As you say, Setanta produces and/or distributes the Arsenal and Liverpool channels, while NewsCorp has relationships with the Chelsea and Man U channels (Sky Sports News has the right to use interviews and clips from those two channels).

I don't see Setanta North America taking Arsenal and Liverpool "in house" because they do have Man U's channel right now.