TV Sports Markets Newslines
A round-up of the major headlines and TV rights news from TV Sports Markets and the world of televised sport. TV Sport Markets is the highly acclaimed industry reference tool for the main players in the broadcast and sport industry worldwide.
- French commercial broadcaster TF1’s coverage of France’s final match at this year’s World Cup drew 8.4 million viewers and a 72.5 per cent audience share.
- US television audiences for the 2010 Fifa World Cup on Disney-owned networks ABC and ESPN are so far up 60 per cent on the 2006 tournament in Germany four years ago.
- The governing council of cricket’s Indian Premier League is to review a nine-year, $1.6 billion media rights agreement between the World Sport Group (WSG) agency and Indian broadcaster Multi Screen Media (MSM) at a meeting on Friday.
- Indian cable and satellite broadcaster Zee has acquired the rights for Spanish football’s La Liga and this year’s Asian Games as part of plans to boost the satellite distribution of its struggling Zee Sports channel.
- Domestic television audiences for this year’s French Open tennis championships at Roland Garros fell for the third year in succession as the early elimination of French players and a clash with the national football team’s World Cup warm-up matches took its toll.
- The European Court of Justice has confirmed an earlier European Commission ruling that the Italian government subsidy for digital-terrestrial decoders, which helped commercial broadcaster Mediaset to rapidly build a successful football and film pay-per-view service to rival Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Italia, was an illegal form of state aid.