Eleven Sports, the OTT service which holds the rights to stream football from Italy’s Serie A and Spain’s La Liga leagues, as well as the Ultimate Fighting Championship, is facing closure just four months after launching in the UK according to the Guardian. Eleven Sports, which is currently available on web and mobile devices, has been unable to secure distribution deals on BT, Sky and Virgin Media. This prompted the UFC to trigger an exit clause pulling its content which was due to become available on the platform in January.
Speaking to SportBusiness Media today, Marc Watson, chief executive of Eleven Sports, vowed that the service will fight on in the UK.
“We continue to negotiate with our UK rights partners to restructure our existing agreements in order to continue our current OTT service in this market for our customers, who are at the forefront of our minds.”
Eleven Sports is part-owned by the IMG sports agency and reportedly has 50,000 UK subscribers – each paying £5.99 a month. The company is also active in Belgium, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Taiwan and the USA.
ABOUT KAUSER KANJI
Kauser Kanji has been working in online video for 19 years, formerly at Virgin Media, ITN and NBC Universal, and founded VOD Professional in 2011. He has since completed major OTT projects for, amongst others, A+E Networks, the BBC, BBC Studios, Channel 4, DR (Denmark), Liberty Global, Netflix, Sony Pictures, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation and UKTV. He now writes industry analyses, hosts an online debate show, OTT Question Time, as well as its in-person sister event, OTT Question Time Live.