ESPN UK Set to Treat MLB Fans With Contempt

Posted by: Kevin Coy on Jul 29, 2009

Tagged in: television , sport , espn uk , baseball

ESPN ESPN's new UK channel, which will replace ESPN America in the United Kingdom from August 3rd is set to alienate its MLB audience, by broadcasting a substantial amount of European football, and games from the MLS in the US, substantially cutting into time available for baseball on the channel. Since the plans came to light about ESPN replacing its american sports channel in the UK with a dedicated sports offering to host its new Premier League contract following the collapse of Setanta Sports, ESPN said that it would show the same level of live american sport, including MLB on the channel. This clearly cannot happen now with the news that they have won European and Russian football rights, which will certainly eat into the time that live american sport would normally be on air.

This is another bitter blow to UK baseball fans, especially considering that Sunday & Wednesday night baseball has disappeared from terrestrial channel, Five for this season, and the failure of the BBC to take up MLB's offer of free terrestrial UK rights to show the games.

More and more, UK baseball fans are being forced to subscribe to MLB.tv, which itself is a pretty shoddy offering at the time of writing, and causes many problems (click here for more on mlb.tv's problems). I'll update you with the latest right here as I get it.

Article from my sports blog; ukyankees.com

Set as favorite

Bookmark

Email This

Comments (1)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Michael said:

...
Good news - ESPN America will still broadcast in the UK.

http://www.espnamerica.com/portal/systemcontent/howtoget::uk

Even if it hadn't, with most live US sport taking place post-9pm UK time, I wouldn't have thought that the additional sport rights ESPN has taken on would have impacted their live US coverage much.

I would also add for sake of clarity, that one vague piece of hearsay in a Daily Mail columnist's conjecture does not mean the BBC refused to cover MLB. Knowing the Daily Mail's penchant for attacking the Beeb, it is entirely possible the comment was placed mischieviously in order to raise hopes, and then have them dashed when no BBC coverage emerged, leading to resentment towards the Beeb. I agree the BBC could and perhaps should have taken up MLB - it would save a hell of a lot of repeats from taking up BBC3's schedule - but to take Dan King's word as gospel and then make a third party look like the bad guys is just plain wrong in my opinion. Lest we forget ITV and C4 could also have taken up the rights - even a channel like Dave might have been interested. The real bad guys here are Five.