Setanta set to challenge Sky for slice of the action

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Setanta, the Irish sports broadcaster that recently emerged as a serious rival to BSkyB for Premiership football rights, announced yesterday that it had secured a berth on the digital terrestrial service Freeview for the first time.
The company has sealed a deal with Top Up TV, the add-on pay-TV element to Freeview founded by the former Sky executives David Chance and Ian West, to use its capacity to show games on a pay-per-view basis.

Starting this weekend, it will initially use the slot to show the Scottish Premier League live games to which it has exclusive rights. But analysts expect the broadcaster to launch an aggressive bid for the rights to some live English Premier League games when the current deal expires in 2007.

Under a compromise deal with the European Commission, the Premier League will have to split the rights between more than one broadcaster, ending Sky's dominance of live coverage.

This has alerted a host of potential bidders, including Setanta. Over the past few months it has signalled its intention to become a major player in sports broadcasting by hiring Trevor East, the former Sky Sports deputy managing director, and was pipped at the post by Sky in the battle for live coverage of the Football League.

Thirty-eight live matches, beginning with Motherwell v Celtic this Saturday, will be available on a pay-per-view basis for between £6 and £8 a game. The deal will initially cover Scotland, expanding to the rest of Britain from the autumn. Although there are now more than five million households with Freeview in Britain, fans who want to watch the matches will need a set-top box compatible with the Top Up TV service. Many of the boxes now on sale have the card slot required to receive the add-on service, which costs £7.99 a month and offers 10 extra channels, including Eurosport, UK Gold and the Discovery Channel.

It is estimated that there are up to 1.5m compatible set-top boxes in circulation. "It's a trend we've seen dramatically changing and we think this will speed it up further," said Mr West, who said he expected almost all boxes sold in Scotland to be compatible from now on.

Viewers will not necessarily have to subscribe to the Top Up TV service. As with the service launched in Italy by MediaSet, fans will be able to buy pay-per-view cards and pick and choose their matches.

Setanta began 15 years ago broadcasting Irish sport in pubs and now operates seven satellite television channels in the US and Europe.

Co-founded and owned by two Irish entrepreneurs, Leonard Ryan and Michael O'Rourke, Setanta recently bought 50% of the North American Sports Network, a pan-European pay-TV channel offering the best of American sport, from the Microsoft tycoon Paul Allen.

Source: The Guardian

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