United Kingdom

Abstract

The United Kingdom (UK) provides a particularly good example of the symbiotic relationship that exists between the sport and television industries. At no time was this more apparent than during the summer of 2012. First, in June, the Premier League agreed a record £3 billion joint deal for the sale of its live domestic television rights with BSkyB, the UK’s leading pay-TV broadcaster, and British Telecom (BT), one of the UK’s most popular broadband providers. This deal underlined the importance attached to live Premier League football by UK pay-TV broadcasters and it is also likely to further increase the (already significant) reliance of England’s biggest football clubs on revenue raised from the sale of their television rights.²⁰ Secondly, a few months later, the BBC’s coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games was watched by record national television audiences.²¹ For the BBC, this was a clear fulfilment of its public service mission to provide programming that ‘unites the nation’. For the IOC, record television viewing figures served to confirm the status of the Olympic Games as one of the world’s most popular sporting events and, largely as a result, one of the most attractive to commercial sponsors. This chapter examines the relationship between the sports and television industries in the UK in more detail. The first part begins by tracing the changing role of sports broadcasting from its initial development as part of a public service broadcasting monopoly/duopoly to its more recent status as premium content for pay-TV (and commercial free-to-air) broadcasters.