Fox Sports Italia to cease broadcasts
June 21, 2018
From Branislav Pekic in Rome
Fox Sports Italia has announced it will stop will stop broadcasting on June 30th, 5 years after the channel launched in Italy.
The somewhat unavoidable destiny of the sports channel, distributed via pay-TV platform Sky Italia, was marked after the recent assigning of the Serie A TV rights. Sky Italia has decided not to renew the distribution contract, for which it paid €32 million a year in the period 2015-2018.
On one hand. Sky Italia was forced to make some sacrifices of some assets after investing €1.3 billion for the Serie A, Champions League and Europa League TV rights. On the other, Fox Sports was faced with the expiry of the rights for the Spanish Liga and realised that it did not have enough attractive sports content for other distribution platforms, according to local daily Italia Oggi.
However, Fox Sports Italia will continue to maintain the existing website FoxSports.it.
Meanwhile, commercial broadcaster Mediaset is registering record TV audiences for its exclusive coverage of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, despite the Italian national team not taking part. The overall audience for all the matches of the first round amounted to 64 million or 10 million more than four years earlier during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil (transmitted by RAI and Sky Italia).