BT Sport has brought the fun back into football – as any viewer could confirm after seeing Gary Lineker and his team of pundits cavorting around the studio when Sergi Roberto’s astonishing last-gasp goal for Barcelona cemented victory over Paris Saint-Germain in the Uefa Champions League last month.
BT Sport will show the FIM Speedway Grand Prix and Monster Energy FIM Speedway World Cut for a second season, which will see all eight Premiership clubs battle it out for a top four spot.
The channel has secured itself as the home of speedway in the UK, with 34 speedway events broadcast live in 2017, 18 British speedway fixtures live starting with the British final on the 19th June in Manchester, 12 Speedway Grand Prix and 4 Speedway World Cup.
Defining success in a connected content world is not straightforward. Is the buzz on social media more important than overnight ratings? And how does one commission shows that will play equally effectively on all devices across all platforms?
Those were the main questions addressed in “Meet the new commissioners.” Session chair Jane Martinson, The Guardian’s head of media, asked some familiar faces with years of experience how the digital world is affecting their decisions.
There has never been a better time to own a second-tier sports event. While first-tier contracts generate mountains of cash – such as the three-year, £5.14bn deal for the English Premier League – it is the market for second-tier sports rights that is currently the most dynamic.
The big reveal will take place at BT's stand at this year's International Broadcasting Conference in Amsterdam where they will also host expert-led sessions on The Next Generation of Networking, Cyber Security, and 4K HDR and Beyond.
Barbara Slater, the Director of BBC Sport, likes to bang the drum for digital. Even so, last year she found the time to blog on the corporation’s website just six times.
Four of those six posts apologetically explained why the BBC had been forced to cede flagship rights and was likely to make further cuts in the future.
The posts unpicked why the BBC, after six decades, had to surrender Open golf and also give up on a, perhaps vainglorious, bid to roll back the years by making the Beeb the exclusive home of Formula 1.
Ant and Dec are nominated for the Entertainment Performance award and will battle it out against The Last Leg's Adam Hills and A League Of Their Own's Jack Whitehall. The Last Leg also receives a nomination for Entertainment programme where it will complete against Release the Hounds and The Graham Norton Show.
The BT Infinity Lab has announced plans to launch a competition to find promising digital entrepreneurs with ideas for innovation in sports broadcasting, with the winning idea to be potentially trialled by BT Sport.
The winner will be mentored by the Lab, and will receive six months of support from BT’s research and innovation teams as well as a six-month membership of TechHub, with access to their events and workspace.
Pay-TV platform BT TV is hoping that an unfolding zombie apocalypse will help it bite out a bigger share of a competitive UK market dominated by Sky. Fear the Walking Dead, the much-anticipated spin-off show of US flesh-eating drama the Walking Dead, is airing exclusively on BT TV as the flagship drama for the first AMC-branded channel in the UK.
It is part of a wider deal struck in June between US cable operator AMC Networks and BT TV.
BT Sport has secured exclusive UK TV rights to broadcast the 2017/18 Australia vs England Ashes in Australia.
Sky previously controlled the live cricket coverage for ten years before losing out to BT Sport.
The five-year rights deal with Cricket Australia, starting from 2016, will show all domestic Test Matches, One Day Internationals and T20 Internationals including the five-match Ashes Test Series against rivals England in 2017/18. Matches against world leading nations such as New Zealand, South Africa, India and Pakistan will also be broadcast.
