Belgium

Football
Belgium

The Dutch and Belgian domestic football leagues, whose pioneering television-rights deals with telecom companies started this month, have begun their seasons with the bulk of live matches accessible to only a handful of intrepid subscribers
Football
Belgium

Football: Spanish Primera Liga champions FC Barcelona agreed a long-term deal with the Mediapro agency which guarantees the club at least €1bn (£685m) for its domestic and international television rights for the seven years from 2006-07 to 2012-13.

Football
Belgium

The Belgian Football Association is threatening to sell the home matches of the national team on a match-by-match basis in Flanders.

Football
Belgium

Football: Spanish free-to-air broadcaster Cuatro sublicensed the non-exclusive rights to at least seven matches from the upcoming World Cup from rival broadcaster La Sexta in a deal worth €20m (£14m).

Cricket
Australia

Football:  Italian pay-television operator Sky Italia acquired the pay-television rights to all 64 matches of the 2006 World Cup, 39 of which it will show exclusively, in a deal with the Infront agency.  Sky is paying an estimated €40m (£27.3m) for the rights.  The deal also includes the rights to this year’s Fifa Confederations Cup, the Fifa World Youth Championships and the 16 26-minute preview programmes produced by Infront (page 1).

Baseball
Asia

Football: French commercial broad-caster TF1 agreed a deal with the Infront agency for the pay-television rights for the 2006 World Cup and sublicensed them to pay-broadcaster Canal Plus and its own cable and satellite channel Eurosport.
Austria

German cable company consortium is takeover target for Liberty Global
Football
Belgium

The pay-television members of a consortium of broadcasters have begun legal proceedings against the Belgian football league after losing out in the award of the league’s television rights

American Football
Belgium

American football:  The US National Football League signed two more television deals: an eight-year deal with Disney-owned sports cable network ESPN for Monday night games, worth $1.
Football
Belgium

The Team Marketing agency has secured good increases in television-rights fees for the next round of Champions League deals
Football
Belgium

Bidders in the Netherlands and Belgium to submit new bids because the initial offers were too low.
Football
Belgium

Increases in subscribers bring value of domestic league football rights into question
Football
Belgium

The importance of choosing the right time and place for rights negotiations
Football
Belgium

Belgian broadcasters refuse to rule out taking legal action

Football
Belgium

The Belgian football league’s deal with Belgacom was agreed despite a matching-rights option held by the incumbent broadcasters.

Australian Rules Football
Australia

Television broadcasters are having difficulty making use of the matching-rights options they negotiated in earlier contracts.

Cricket
Asia

Cricket: The Nimbus Sport agency acquired the worldwide television rights to cricket in India in a four-year deal with the Board of Control for Cricket in India. Nimbus will pay $612
Football
Belgium

Versatel has jumped into the vanguard of an emerging movement by telecoms companies to seriously challenge broadcasters for live television rights.