International Sports Coverage

I’m sorry I confused the standards, what ever the case Fox was planning on offering the football game in HDR. Fox produced the game and were using the HLG standard for distribution to cable and satellite companies. However according to Forbes they promoted that the HDR feed would be able to be viewed on Apple TV and Roku devices - the problem was that they don’t support the HLG standard.

https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/fox-sports-to-launch-thursday-night-football-in-4k-with-hdr

Here are some more details at SVG. The production will be in SDR and in addition to previously announced DirecTV as carriage they have added Comcast. For cameras they are using seven HDC-4300s in a hard configuration, five HDC-4300s as handhelds, a HDC-4800 in a position for super slo motion, and the HDC-P50 in the Sky/Cablecam? (Is the P50 sensor equivalent to the one in the HDC-5500?).

Replays will be using EVS XT4K, however due to I/O the replays will be 1080p and unconverted to 4K. There will be 30 Cobalt UDX cross converters.

As for distribution it’s being sent to DirecTV using MediaKinds HEVC encoding to send a full raster 4K (3840x2160) using a 80Mbps satellite backhaul circuit.

The game will feature Dolby Atmos audio.

As for HDR, ESPN’s Chris Calcinari says “As the HDR standard becomes unified across all platforms and devices, we will be prepared to add this feature down the road.”

3 way split for the Champions League rights in France:

https://www.sportbusiness.com/news/canal-plus-bein-and-tf1-win-back-champions-league-in-record-deal/

TF1 have the final, Canal+ have first choice of a match Tuesday and Wednesdays while BeIN have all the other matches

RMC Sports who also show the Premier League currently hold the rights.

The Guardian reporting that the WTO are to rule that Saudi Arabia were indeed behind beoutQ - also putting the Saudi takeover of Newcastle Utd in doubt.

It'll be fine, Saudi Arabia are the good bad guys remember.

As of today they can. (But not the V1 Sky Q boxes)

Mediapro, the spanish group which from next season will be the main broadcaster of French Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 untill at least 2024, reached an agreement with the commercial broadcaster TF1 for the utilization of "Téléfoot" for the name of this new channel (same name as TF1's football show broadcast on Sundays at 11am). At the same time, the TF1's duo of commentators with journalist Grégorie Margotton and former world champion Bixente Lizarazu will comment 20 matchs per season and principally big games like Le Classique and Le Choc des Olympiques per example.

Source: SportBusiness

TF1 also at one point also had a 25% share in the now closed TPS Foot channel (which along with the rest of the TPS platform was bought by Canal+).

New D/AT/CH Bundesliga deal for 2021-4

Saturday and Midweek matches - Sky Deutschland - approx 200 matches.
Friday and Sunday matches - DAZN - approx 100 matches.

Let's hope this 'victory' will suppress the desire of DAZN to elbow in with the upcoming UK broadcasting rights for the Premier League.

Some reports seem to infer that the Bundesliga's income from this combined deal is around £200m down over 3 years on the amount received in the last German language European deal in 2017 for 2018-21. That could be a signpost for other deals going forwards.

Related to the Saudi/Qatar dispute, the piracy from BeOutQ and the Italian Super Cup being played in Saudi Arabic, BeIN has opted for a 'blackout' of Serie A coverage with no matches being shown on any of its channels in the 35 territories where it has the rights:

https://www.sportbusiness.com/news/bein-opts-for-serie-a-blackout-in-latest-piracy-spat/