Update on the Sky Sports U.K. Broadcasting Rights

Earlier in the week we covered how Sky Sports had retained its four existing broadcast packages. Well, today Sky has indeed executed the boa constrictor-esque move and snagged the Monday evening games away from Setanta. That leaves Setanta with only one of the six U.K. broadcasting packages, the Saturday evening game. And it leaves ESPN with a big old goose-egg when it comes to U.K. broadcasting through 2013.

Although Setanta is doing great job of spin control, as the BBC points out, Sky is now broadcasting 115 games, and Setanta is relegated to lower tier status.

The total price paid by Sky for the five packages is over £1.7 billion, meaning that the Premier League has another three years of guaranteed big-time television revenue. Although the overall income for all six packages (plus the BBC’s rights to show highlights on the Match of the Day) remains about the same as in 2007-2010, the fact that revenue is flat despite the faltering economy amounts to a huge success. Again, you can expect the EPL transfer market to continue to flourish.

Now, from an American perspective, the interesting thing is that Setanta’s successful bid on the Saturday evening games was actually around 50% lower than what it paid last time around. Keep in mind that the European Union prohibits one broadcaster from showing all games, a rule that was promulgated in response to Sky’s monopoly in the U.K. in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. This likely means that ESPN and Setanta agreed not to table competing bids, meaning that there must be some truth to the thought that the two are in some sort of negotiations.

This also means that FSC is in the driver's seat to continue to broadcast games in the U.S. because they can easily share broadcast teams with Sky. There was some discussion in the comments on the last post about whether networks or the league provide the broadcasters -- at least according to that bastion of knowledge Wikipedia, it's the networks. So, as I suspected, this makes it quite cost-prohibitive for ESPN to broadcast games in the U.S. that are shown by Sky in the U.K. because they would be required to provide redundant broadcast teams. Fox Soccer, on the other hand, would only need to share a satellite feed.

I'm still convinced that the Saturday evening game makes the most sense for ESPN to show in the U.S., because it's a 12:30 p.m. start on the East Coast. And now that's the lone game that Setanta owns the rights to in the U.K. Despite college throwball and basketball, that's a good time to try to create an audience for EPL games in America. So it'll be very interesting to see what happens now with the U.S. broadcasting rights.

ESPN got shut out and Sky essentially ran the table. Will the same thing happen here?

(Props to the entire UF crew for helping with this post!)