Premiership Plus

Sky Box Office wiill broadcast 40 live matches from the FA Barclaycard Premiership each season for the next three years.

The extra live matches will be shown on a new service called Premiership Plus, available to all Sky digital subscribers on channel 433.

The first live match scheduled for the new service wll be Chelsea v Newcaste United on Sunday August 19. To date, 11 matches have been selected for live broadcast, featuring 14 different clubs. During the season each club will be seen live between one and six times on the new service.

They're not even branding it Sky Premiership Plus? Odd. Must be confident people will pay.

Cheers, Asa

So these will be extra matches to those shown on Sky Sports 1 ? On a pay-per-view basis, right ?

They are PPV. Marcus Buckland, who presented Nationwide coverage on Sky, will anchor the matches, with George Graham (he should never have been sacked!) providing the analysis.

I have not been able to find out whether or not
a) It is Premiership Plus because the channel will be available on all platforms that have access to the PPV Premiership
b) All the platforms have to provide their own coverage, in terms of presenters, not the footage

Aren't ITV Digital also having some PPV Premiership games also ?

Didn't realise ITV Sports Channel had poached Matt Smith of BBC's 'Football Fever' and BBC News Sport Bulletins to present.

Really - didn't know that. I think he's a really good presenter and was brilliant on BBC Five Live when he was there - he's also been good on the Sports bulletins on the News which are always mildly amusing (not in a bad way!).

Do we know any more about the new channel - ie. what will be on it in terms of Sky Sports News type programming for when there aren't live events?

Not sure about all of the programming, apart from the live Nationwide League, Champions League and Worthington Cup. There will be magazine programmes, probably for each division. The premier league match of the day will probably get repeats on there too. I expect that they will show many of the Champions League ties in full, involving all the other teams during the week, this is what ON Sport used to do. They will have some snooker and tennis too, hopefully they will have a daily sports news show so the whole thing doesn't become dominated by football.

Can anyone tell me if ITV Sports Channel is to be carried on Sky from launch or is it just ONd ?

Read on produxion.com that the Beeb are introducing 3D computer generated graphic recreations of some of the key moments from next seasons Premier League and international football matches.  This would allow graphic downloads around 15 minutes after the action on BBC Online.


(Edited by square eyes at 8:27 pm on July 5, 2001)