IRB Rugby World Cup: Austrailia 2003 - live on ITV

There was worse in 1999 when the Sunday morning schedule on ITV went like this due to F1....

5.30 ITV Morning News
6.00 GMTV: News
6.10 GMTV: Jellikins
6.15 F1 Live

and then that went on for about three hours or so, I think it was until 9.00am, but then after that I think it was CITV, but I have this morning of GMTV on video (I know it's sad) but there's no ad breaks! What was the point of coming on?

Was this the day when DiGGiT broadcast LIVE for the first time ona sunday through till 11am due to itv taking GMTV's airtime.

The ITV Rugby World Cup website is now up and running at http://rugby.itv.com - quite a nice little site really.

The full schedule isn't on there yet, apparently it's all going to be unveiled on 22nd September at a press conference in London.

However, the Opening Ceremony and 1st match will air on ITV1 at 10.15am on Friday 10th October, the first ITV2 game will be Saturday 11th October at 5:15am (into GMTV2 time). Every game will be shown live on ITV1 or 2.

How come itv sport dont know that itv2 has a new logo that isnt the itv logo with the itv1 style yellow square on the end.

Nice to see home support on the who will win the cup poll:

england : 10%

new zealand : 82%

other : 7 %

And this also doesnt equal 100%!

IIRC from press releases a few weeks ago HTV are providing their own coverage of Wales' matches and will be opting out of national ITV coverage. I may be wrong but I'm sure I read somewhere that S4C will also be providing coverage of Wales' matches as they have secured some sort of deal as well

And they don't even have the decency to include the other home nations!!!

Re: S4C - in 1999 they had highlights in the evenings to the Wales games, but no live games.

Also, silly question, but surely as the home nations are each represented, shouldn't the rights be sold to each nation. I know we could have the situation where BBC Wales, ITV1 England, STV/Grampian and BBC NI have the rights, but surely as each nation is represented individually, the rights should be sold as such. I'd have thought this could also apply to Celtic/Rangers in the Champions League.

No mention of the Wales team on the ITV website so here's the rugby link on ITV1 Wales' website

http://www.itv1wales.com/rugby/

Full details of the schedule are now on itv.com

- Tornament runs from October 10th to November 22nd
- All 48 matches are live on either ITV1 or ITV2
- A 60 minute highlights show will air at 7pm on ITV2, 9pm on the ITV News Channel and after 11pm on ITV1

There are only 8 days when GMTV1 will be affected, all but one of these being at weekends, and are as follows:

Sunday 12th October - Rugby starts for a 9am kick off
Saturday 25th October - Rugby starts for a 9.30am kick off
Sunday 26th October - Rugby starts for a 7.30am kick off
Sat or Sun 8/9th Nov - Rugby starts for a 7.30am kick off
Saturday 15th November - Rugby starts for a 9.00am kick off
Sunday 16th November - Rugby starts for a 9.00am kick off
Thur or Fri 20/21st Nov - Rugby Starts for a 9.00am kick off
Saturday 22nd November - Rugby starts around 7am

Having flicked through the schedule there are a couple of surprises. I would have thought all the home nations games would have been on ITV1, but they all have one game on ITV2 (including England) - although I'm sure ITV1 Wales is screening all the Welsh games.

Meanwhile, ITV1 have a couple of neutral games - France v Fiji and South Africa v Georgia.

Some matches are on ITV News Channel.

http://www.teletext.co.uk/tvplus/generic.asp?slot=311&page=1&ref=305

That's news to me.

Well this suprises me, you'd think that when The Champions League went to Sky, you'd think that this would be the end of this sort of thing, by putting Live Sport on a News Channel. Freeview viewers will be buggered if a game starts before 9.25am.

Though I say it was better in the days when they used to put The Champions League on Granada Plus or Cartlon Select when there was no space on ITV and ITV2 hadn't begun yet.