News

NASN to show live baseball in Europe

Ten Major League Baseball games a week will be televised live across Europe in a broadcasting deal that demonstrates the growing value of American sports overseas.

NASN, a specialist American sports channel, has paid more than $20 million (Pounds 11.6 million) to show live baseball in Britain and on the Continent for the next five years in the belief that it can attract up to ten million subscribers.

Amory Schwarz, chief executive of NASN, said that he hoped that the purchase of the rights would help to increase its number of channel subscribers "to between seven million and ten million in continental Europe" over the next year.

The US sports channel is already available to 200,000 people in the UK on cable and satellite and a further 1.4 million in the rest of Europe. In Britain, subscriber numbers have been boosted by a recent agreement to bundle NASN, which is less than three years old, with other sports channels also owned by Setanta.

Setanta, an aggressive Irish broadcaster that holds rights to Scottish Premier League football, owns NASN with Benchmark Capital, a private equity group. Setanta itself is also backed by Benchmark.

NASN is trying to carve a niche as the principal home of American exports, and the channel recently acquired rights to broadcast the National Hockey League -the principal ice-hockey league -across Europe. About 40 per cent of ice-hockey players come from Europe, mainly from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.

The channel hopes that the acquisition of rights will allow it to win agreements to be distributed on pay-television operators' basic tier of channels.

The channel faces a threat from Walt Disney's ESPN, the US market leader, which is gradually building up in Europe.