Sky retains Premier League rights, ESPN loses out

Sky has beaten off competition to secure the rights to live English Premier League (EPL) football matches until 2015-16. ESPN has lost out to BT Vision, which was awarded two packages of live rights.

Sky will pay £760 million (€943 million) per year for three seasons starting in August 2013 for five packages. It will show a total of 116 matches each season. Sky has been awarded live rights across all platforms, including satellite, cable, IPTV, online and mobile.

“In what was a very competitive tender process, we are pleased to have secured the combination of rights that we wanted, providing certainty for us and our customers. Whilst the cost is higher, we have capacity for this increase through the combination of excellent work on cost efficiency across the business and choices over other future spending. As a result, we remain confident of delivering our financial plans, in line with our expectations, unchanged, in each year of the new deal,” Jeremy Darroch, Sky’s Chief Executive, said.

ESPN has aired Premier League matches since 2009, taking over from Setanta Sports, but will show its last game at the end of the next season. BT Vision, which has been keen to boost subscriber numbers to its hybrid TV platform, will show 38 matches each season under the deal.

The deal is worth £3.018 billion to the EPL.