Sky Sports will launch their coverage of the 2016 GAA Championship season in Dublin today and Sport for Business will be dropping by for a chat with Producer Steve Smith which we will carry in Monday’s edition of our Daily Digest.
This is the third year of Sky’s coverage of the GAA and will be the last going into a negotiation over whether they will be back again after the award of the next round of rights covering 2017 to 2019.
Informed sources within the broadcaster have indicated they are very keen to build on the commitment they made in 2014 and the defeat of a motion at this year’s congress which sought to prohibit ‘pay per view’ TV leaves the Association free to negotiate what it sees as the best deal for the sports.
Sky replaced TV3 as the second broadcast partner behind RTÉ when the current deal was awarded.
Investment from Liberty means that they are likely to be back at the table again, especially having won the rights to the RBS 6 Nations in the future and the negotiations promise to be one of the most interesting and difficult to predict stories of the next few months.
The Future of TV Sport was debated earlier this month in front of an interested audience of Sport for Business members and guests at the RTÉ studios in Montrose where Ryle Nugent of RTÉ Sport, Mark Deering of Sky Ireland and Noel Quinn Media Rights Manager of the GAA and General Manager of GAA Go were all involved.
