The English Premier League soccer assets of the ailing Setanta sports channel have gone to Disney’s ESPN ‘ a signal that ESPN is starting to get dreams of global sporting conquest.
This week it has secured the presence of those games on the UK Freeview broadcast service via Top Up TV, the same route that Setanta used to broadcast them, which is a Pay TV channel on the usually free Freeview service. Disney will soon launch a HD version of its soccer programming on Sky.
ESPN has acquired the 46 UK soccer games for the 2009/2010 season and 23 games in each of the three following seasons, which were put back up for sale when it was obvious that Setanta could not pay for them as it went into administration.
These games cost Disney around £250 million ($412 million) for the soccer rights over the next four seasons. Freeview goes to 10 million UK homes and it will now try to get them to sign up for subscriptions. The dominant portion of soccer games went to Sky in a recent auction, and Setanta got into trouble as a broadcaster when Sky outbid it for more of the UK soccer games. Subscriptions immediately began to slide.
What Disney is doing in the UK, is buying local assets like these soccer matches, and then using its existing US sports coverage to tempt carriers like Sky and BT Vision to make them available on their platforms. Sky has just agreed to carry ESPN US, and already carries the ex-Setanta soccer games and ESPN believes it is close to offering its new Soccer games to Virgin Media and BT Vision.
Meanwhile the founders of Setanta have put in a bid to take back control of their sports channel’s remaining assets through the administrator. The channel came into being when two Irish businessmen wanted to watch their national team (rugby we think) at a World Cup, and no TV channels cared to put those games on. They took a cheap local license and sold the games in a handful of locations and thought it was such a good idea they’d turn it into a business.
The buy out deal involves repayment of some €220 million by Setanta and it will then re-approach BSkyB to get its carriage contract back. The new business hopes to will raise more money and begin afresh.