![]() The cost may be a penalty for your wallet, but the broadcaster has certainly assembled an impressive team sheet for its Sky-competing service: Gary Lineker, Jake Humphrey and Rio Ferdinand will front the live UEFA Champions League coverage on BT Sport Europe. This channel will show all 38 of its live Barclays Premier League matches, as well as the Aviva Premiership and SPFL. The £5 monthly tariff will not be available to non-BT Broadband customers.īT will also continue to give its broadband customers the option of receiving BT Sport 1 for free. The free package comes at a cost, though: BT TV starts from £7.50 a month, plus an additional £16.99 monthly line rental for BT Broadband: a total of £24.49 per month, plus a one-off £49 activation fee.īT Broadband customers who choose to watch on their Sky service, through the BT Sport App or on BT Mobile, will be able to add the BT Sport Pack for £5 a month. These customers will be able to receive the full BT Sport Pack for free – comprising BT Sport 1, BT Sport 2, ESPN on BT Sport and the new BT Sport Europe channel, which launches on August 1st. Kicking off contractsīT, of course, will hope that this taster will woo people onto to its pay-TV service, where all 351 matches will be free to subscribers. We have opened the market to millions of new customers and we want to build on that as BT Sport becomes the undisputed home of European football,” comments John Petter, chief executive of BT Consumer. “When we launched BT Sport we promised to make televised football far more accessible and affordable than it has been to date. Each participating British team will be shown at least once. Called BT Sport Showcase, this channel will show a minimum of 12 UEFA Champions League matches and 14 UEFA Europa League matches per season, which will be available to anyone to watch for free. Free matches for everyoneįans who cannot afford Sky, though, may still be disappointed by the deal, as it means that European club football will no longer be live on Freeview.īut BT has promised to make matches available for non-customers too, via a new, free-to-air channel on digital TV. “Overall, Champions League accounts for just 2.5 per cent of Sky Sports viewing, while the Premier League is seven times bigger.”Ĭompared to the highly popular Premier League, the Champions League is certainly an unpredictable bag: in 2008, 14.6 million people tuned in to watch Man U beat Chelsea, as audience levels tend to be dictacted by how well English teams do in the tournament. “Over the last five seasons we have seen Champions League audiences fall 36 per cent,” said Sky in a blog post. Sky has already hit back at BT, claiming that it will not miss the tournament after what it says was its worst season ever: Sky’s coverage of the final on Saturday night attracted an audience of fewer than 500,000 viewers, almost a third of the figures for last year’s final. Now, its £900m deal with UEFA will give its exclusive rights to two European tournaments, breaking down to £299m a season – a significant hike from the £400m deal between Sky and ITV. In 2012, BT paid £738 million for the rights to 38 Premier League games, which it then offered to broadband customers for free. It also marks another step in BT’s journey to become one of the country’s leading sports broadcasters. ![]() The deal, which will run for three seasons from the start of the 2015/2016 competition, marks the first time a single UK broadcaster has the rights to the matches from both tournaments. The announcement follows BT’s acquisition of the UK rights to UEFA Champions League football, which were previously shared between Sky and ITV. The kick-off at the Stade de France was delayed by more than half-an-hour, with fans subjected to antiquated police methods outside of the stadium.BT will offer UEFA Champions League and Europa League football free to all BT TV customers from next season. UEFA are therefore expecting a 20 per cent increase on their last deal and are also planning to sell highlights packages to suitors, with ITV tipped to be a contender.īT’s coverage has come under scrutiny in recent times, particularly following May’s Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid. The end of the current broadcasting deal also coincides with the radical changes that will be introduced, including an additional four teams entering the competition, playing eight group matches apiece. Their current arrangement sees them show 20 live matches a season and have presented a vastly different product to their rivals, including televising an entire gameweek at the same time.Īmazon believes that showing live sports will in turn increase the amount of Prime subscribers, with a report in 2020 revealing there was a 35 per cent growth off the back of Premier League football. Amazon already had a contract to show Champions League games in Germany and have also broken the duopoly on Premier League broadcasting in the UK.
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