Media: Soccer clash of Cup Final proportions Jon Henderson and Emily Bell on the billion-pound battle for TV football rights

• Published in: The Observer (London)
• Main Author: Jon Henderson and Emily Bell
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Guardian News & Media Limited 09.04.2000
• ISSN: 0029-7712

The cup-tie pits pay TV company BSkyB against the terrestrial broadcasters, with the prospect of Bill Gates and his pals in the cable industry ready to come off the subs bench to add to the tension. The billion-pound question is whether Sky can hang on to the exclusive live contract which, a decade ago, transformed it from a pounds 5 million a week loss-maker into Europe's most profitable broadcaster. With the pressures of going digital eroding Sky's profits to zero, can it afford to hang on to the lion's share of live football? More importantly, can it afford to lose it? One of the first challenges to break cover comes from the increasingly confident ITV Network. ITV plans to become the first terrestrial television channel to show Premiership matches live if a joint bid with ONdigital for the next three-year contract is successful. This revives the prospect of the first ever live Premiership matches on free to air TV remember the Premiership only started in 1992, when Sky bagged the contract. ITV and ONdigital are perhaps the most natural pairing of all given that ONdigital is owned by two of ITV's major players, Carlton and Granada, and that they already successfully share coverage of the European Champions League.