Starting next season, the English Premier League will have a new home in the United States, as NBC Universal announced late Sunday that it has become the exclusive English and Spanish-Languagemedia rights holder in the U.S. for EPL matches across platforms and devices. All of the league’s 380 matches will be accessible across NBC’s properties, which include NBC, NBC SportsNetwork and NBCSports.com, in addition to Telemundo and mun2 for Spanish-language coverage.
According to Sports Illustrated, the media giant’s winning bid was $250 million for athree-year agreement, which is more than triple the $23 million per year that Fox currently pays for its deal.
In an interview, NBC Chairman Mark Lazarus confirmed that EPLfans would have access to every match on the schedule through some type of NBC platform. “It will not be unlike the Olympics where you saw programming on CNBC, Bravo, USA or MSNBC,” Lazarus said. “Weare working to make it a consistent schedule so fans know exactly where to find games. But the Premier League fan will be able to get to every game live.”
As SI points out, the league hassix traditional weekly broadcast slots, including three on Saturday, two on Sunday and one on Monday, which collectively add up to around 200 games. The remaining 180 will be made available eitheronline or through some type of arrangement with your local multichannel video programming distributor (i.e. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, etc).