BT Vision, the new broadcast player in TV sport has added to its Rugby and Premier League rights with the signing of deals from next season to cover Italian Serie A, French Ligue 1, US Major League Soccer and the top flight of the Brazilian League.
In total this will include more than 500 live games as well as support preview and review content, much of which is currently shown in Ireland and Britain on ESPN.
BT has yet to announce the branding or the platforms on which its new sports content will be shown from 2013.  It has though started to build its pool of presenters, taking the BBC’s Jake Humphrey to become its main soccer anchor.
It sprang to prominence earlier this year when winning the secondary package of rights for the Barclays Premier League over the next three seasons, as well as the rights to all English Club Rugby, including its participating clubs in European competition, again from the start of next season.
The last of these rights packages has been hotly disputed in rugby as the Heineken Cup rights are exclusively with Sky.
A third meeting of clubs, national Rugby unions and European Rugby Cup to resolve the future of TV rights and the structure of the premier European club competition will take place today in Dublin.
New players in the Digital TV space, as well as online broadcast and the use of data will be among the topics to be discussed at next week’s Sport for Business Members’ round table on broadcasting and sport to be held at the Dublin studios of RTE.
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