Exclusive: World Snooker Looks to Bump Up Coverage after ITV Deal for World Open

By Ismail Uddin

With ITV signing a deal to broadcast the World Open, their first ranking event for 20 years, World Snooker have revealed they will look to build on this deal internationally. 

The World Open will be broadcast by ITV4 in the UK, ITV’s first ranking event snooker since the 1993 British Open. 

In the intervening 20 years ITV has shown various invitation tournaments and, more recently, Power Snooker. But by broadcasting a full ranking event they are making a much greater commitment.

Miles Pearce, World Snooker Commercial Director was very pleased with the deal and hoped it would lead to further ranking events.

“Were really happy that we are bringing ITV again into our global footprint. I think what ITV is doing and specifically ITV4 is really good for sport in general and we are glad they can look at Snooker and broadcast our ranking event,” he told iSportconnect exclusively.

“I know this is a single event at this time but we hope to grow this in the future for the rankings events. It is very much a testing time and a trial and we will see where we get to.”

Pearce also suggested that the European market was covered by their various broadcast deals and World Snooker should look to other markets to extend their reach.

“Everything were looking at in Europe is growing quite considerably.

“Outside of Europe were working very hard with our partners at IMG Media who look after our international broadcast side of things. That’s pretty much about taking what we’ve got currently which is China and Thailand to take our events live and were trying to get other countries, who currently take highlights, in to taking live broadcasts.

“We also very interested in what we can do in North America where we haven’t had broadcasts for the past fifteen years so we are working hard to try and see if we can build a bigger presence over there as well.”

World Snooker are also on the brink of annoucing new sponsors.