Premier League

The new deal will come into play from the 2025-26 season, and will cover four years. For the first time, all matches outside the Saturday 3.00pm blackout (a rule introduced in 1960 to prevent matches from being televised between 2.45pm and 5.25pm on that day) will be broadcast live.

Sky won four of the five packages to show a minimum of 215 matches a season, including all first pick matches. Sky Sports will therefore be the home of Saturday 5.30pm kick-offs, Sunday 2.00pm and 4.30pm kick-offs, plus Monday and Friday night fixtures and three midweek rounds.

Matthew Garrahan, Financial Times: Sky was primarily a satellite business. You’ve moved aggressively into IP. Are you turning off the satellite dishes any time soon?

Dana Strong, Sky: It’s a key strategic pillar for us to move on to a new, IP-based platform and this year we literally blew the satellite dish up in our TV commercials.… Seeing where the trends in consumption were going, we wanted to ensure consumers had choice…

Broadcast live from Media City in Salford, the show will not only celebrate the year’s greatest sporting moments but will also pay homage to the ordinary people and Unsung Heroes using the power of sport to sustain the nation through unprecedented times.

Despite several iconic events in the sporting calendar being cancelled or postponed, 2020 was still a year to remember for many.

At an RTS event in September, some of the leading figures in sports broadcasting recalled the moment when the Covid-19 lockdown brought down the curtain on live sport in the UK.

“It was a moment that had been coming,” said Sky Sports Managing Director Rob Webster, looking back to the March lockdown. “Our Italian colleagues were ahead of us in terms of the virus and their sport. It was only a matter of time.

A run-of-the-mill English Premier League fixture on a Tuesday evening early next month is set to be one of the most significant football matches to be played in more than two decades.

That is because the game between Crystal Palace and Bournemouth will be the first ever to be broadcast live and exclusively by one of the tech giants.

Amazon, the global digital platform and retailer, is showing this and 19 other Premier League games to UK audiences during December via its subscription service Amazon Prime after paying about £90m for a three-year deal.

Mike Darcey assesses how vulnerable Sky is to a bid for Premier League rights from one of the tech giants

Gary Davey is one of pay-TV’s most experienced executives. He was part of the team that launched Sky TV in the late 1980s. Now, after holding senior positions in Sky Italia, Sky Deutschland and Star TV (when he was based in Hong Kong), he is back in the UK. He was appointed Sky’s Managing Director for Content in January 2015.

Sky Sports is to broadcast extended highlights of 212 Premier League games, starting next season. 

It means viewers will be able to watch games and extended highlights for the first time ever on catch up.

Sky Sports Managing Director Barney Francis said: “Sky Sports has never been in a stronger position with this deal cementing our position as the first choice for sports fans.”

The Premier League is to enhance the protection of its live sport coverage.

They have partnered up with security service Friend MTS to identify those who exploit the security of their video content.

Kevin Plumb, Head of Legal Services for The Premier League, said to Broadband TV News that: “Protecting the distribution of our live games across all video platforms is paramount to us and our broadcast partners."