Digital streaming service ESPN+ will become the exclusive distributor of pay-per-view events for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in the USA.

The events will begin on April 13, almost exactly a year since parent company Walt Disney Co launched ESPN+ to retain viewers as traditional cable audiences started migrating to OTT services.

Reuters reports:

ESPN+ attracted 568,000 new subscribers when UFC debuted in January after the Las Vegas-based mixed martial arts promoter, a unit of Endeavor, LLC, moved fights there from Fox Sports.

By the time Disney held its quarterly earnings call with investors in February, it said ESPN+ had signed up 2 million paying subscribers. It is the model for Disney+, a streaming service for family-friendly Disney content that is supposed to launch later this year.

The UFC deal takes the traditional pay-per-view (PPV) model to a new level, giving ESPN+ subscribers exclusive access to the “biggest and most important fights,” said ESPN+ Executive Vice President Russell Wolff,.

The deal will also give the UFC something it has never had before: data about its PPV audience, including information about who is buying event access and viewers’ propensity to purchase goods, said UFC Chief Operating Officer Lawrence Epstein.

Fans will be able to access UFC content in one place, rather than having to jump to different platforms as they did in the past. The agreement does not impact UFC’s commercial sales to the thousands of U.S. bars and restaurants that air its fights, Epstein said.

Monday’s UFC deal is an expansion of its previous ESPN+ agreement, which covered media rights to UFC Fight Night and now runs through 2025 along with the PPV deal.

The expanded agreement covers 12 live PPV events per year that will be streamed in high definition in English and Spanish.

PPV UFC fights will cost $59.99 per event for current ESPN+ subscribers, slightly less than the $64.99 fans usually paid in the past. New subscribers will pay $79.99 for their first PPV event and get one-year of ESPN+ access.

Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) President Tsunekazu Takeda, who is under investigation for suspected corruption, said on Tuesday he will step down from his position when his term ends in June and resign from the International Olympic Committee.

Reuters reports:

Takeda, who was president of the 2020 bid committee, said during a JOC board of directors meeting in Tokyo he would step down and not seek re-election.

French prosecutors have questioned Takeda in Paris and placed him under formal investigation in December for suspected corruption in Tokyo’s successful bid to host the 2020 Summer Games.

At a news conference later on Tuesday, Takeda said: “I don’t believe I’ve done anything illegal.”

When asked why he had not resigned with immediate effect, Takeda said: “It pains me to have created such a fuss, but I believe it is my responsibility to serve out the rest of my term.”

Takeda had been head of the JOC since 2001 and his resignation leaves a cloud hanging over both the national committee and the organizers of the Tokyo 2020 Games.

He also serves on Tokyo 2020’s Executive Committee but it was unclear whether he would also be standing down from this role.

French investigators have led a years-long probe into corruption in athletics and in early 2016 extended their inquiry into the bidding and voting processes for the hosting of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro and the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.

Multi-million dollar payments made by the Tokyo bid committee to a Singapore consulting company are under probe and Takeda is suspected of paying bribes to secure the winning bid.

Takeda has denied any wrongdoing, saying that there was nothing improper with the contracts made between the committee and the consultancy and that they were for legitimate work.

The IOC’s ethics commission has opened an ethics file on Takeda, who chairs the IOC’s marketing commission. Takeda has been a member of the IOC since 2012 and was president of the Tokyo 2020 bid committee.

Tokyo 2020 organizers have yet to comment on Takeda’s resignation.

The JOC is expected to elect a new president in June during regular biennial voting.

Japanese media have reported that former Olympic judo champion Yasuhiro Yamashita and Japan Football Association President Kozo Tashima, both JOC Executive Board members, could be in line to take over.

The fight against football piracy has led to the first guilty verdicts against public establishments that broadcast LaLiga matches illegally, with over 600 locations having had legal proceedings opened against them.

The judgements handed down so far consider the owners of these public establishments to be in violation of intellectual property law.

The penalties are a minimum prison sentence of four months, payment of penalties, compensation payments to LaLiga for damages and losses caused and the payment of legal fees.

These judgements confirm the effectiveness of the Content Licensing Verification Territorial Network created by LaLiga, the objective of which is to protect the audio-visual rights of Spanish clubs and to defend law-abiding establishments that are unfairly affected by competition from illegal broadcasters.

This team, made up of around 100 professionals, works throughout Spain detecting public establishments that are profiting from the fraudulent emission of LaLiga content.

More than 80,000 visits have already taken place during this season, with more than 19,000 fraudulent emissions detected, as well as about 60 cases of sub-operators and installers who have profited from commercialising and / or facilitating access to LaLiga content in public places.

In order to further increase its effectiveness, these efforts have been carried out in close collaboration with Mediapro, which owns the rights to distribute LaLiga matches in public places in Spain.

With the information gathered by this team, LaLiga reported more than 4,300 establishments to the police authorities, which led to a national operation by the police force’s Cybercrime Unit.

As a result, more than 800 illegal decoders were seized.

The crimes that are alleged to have been committed carry penalties of up to four years in prison for those responsible.

Although the majority of the operation was carried out during the month of December 2018, several police operations have been replicated in the islands of Mallorca and Gran Canaria over recent weeks.

According to a press release from the national police force, agents in “found that approximately 75% of inspected establishments were carrying out illegal activity through various forms.”

In addition to public establishments that broadcast football illegally, LaLiga is focused on sub-operators and installers whose business is to provide pirate decoders to both individuals and public places.

LaLiga has also achieved success here, as a local court recently brought measures against a popular operator that broadcasts in the Sevillian town of Aznalcóllar and had been illegally providing the signal of LaLiga matches to public establishments without having authorisation to do so.

The measures consist mainly of:

• Requiring the different public establishments that are customers of this illegal operator to immediately cease broadcasting and to hand over their  decoders to the authorities for inspection;
• Requiring the investigated operator to immediately stop supplying LaLiga content to any type of public establishment or face charges. This cessation will also be verified by the national police force’s Technological Research Unit.

Britain’s richest man Jim Ratcliffe rode to the rescue of Team Sky when the chemicals billionaire was confirmed as the new owner of the powerhouse cycle team today.

A statement from the team said current owners Sky and 21st Century Fox had agreed a sale to INEOS, the company owned by Ratcliffe, who will become the sole owners from May 1.

Reuters reports:

Broadcaster Sky announced last December that it was pulling the plug on its reported 30 million pounds ($39.80 million) backing of the team that has won eight Grand Tours since it was founded by former British Cycling performance director Dave Brailsford in 2010.

The news that keen cyclist Ratcliffe has stepped in means Team Sky, whose stellar cast of riders includes four-times Tour de France winner Chris Froome and current champion Geraint Thomas, will continue challenging for the sport’s big prizes.

Team INEOS’s first outing will be at the Tour de Yorkshire which starts in Doncaster on May 2.

“Cycling is a great endurance and tactical sport that is gaining ever more popularity around the world,” Ratcliffe, chairman and CEO of INEOS, said in a statement.

“INEOS is delighted to take on the responsibility of running such a professional team.”

Brailsford, accused of crossing an “ethical line” by a British parliamentary committee report into allegations of wrongdoing and abuse of anti-doping rules, said it was an exciting new chapter for the team.

“Today’s announcement is great news for the team, for cycling fans, and for the sport more widely,” he said.

“It ends the uncertainty around the team and the speed with which it has happened represents a huge vote of confidence in our future. It heralds the start of a hugely exciting new chapter for us all as Team INEOS.”