World Snooker Extend Broadcasting Deal with Eurosport

Eurosport have extended their partnership with World Snooker for an additional five seasons to run through to the 2015-2016 season.

The new agreement nearly doubles Eurosport’s snooker offering, which increases from 10 to 19 tournaments per season. The sport’s biggest tournaments, including the World Championship, will be shown to over 125 million homes in Europe.

Eurosport has acquired all exclusive TV and digital rights to broadcast live the 19 tournaments on Eurosport and Eurosport 2 channels as well as on the Eurosport Player web TV service and mobile application. The deal covers all Eurosport’s 59 countries.

Eurosport has broadcast snooker since 2003 and contributed to its growing popularity in Europe thanks to unrivalled exposure. Last season over 500 hours of snooker were broadcast on Eurosport, reaching 96 million different viewers, and these figures are set to increase.

During the coming 2011/12 season, Eurosport and Eurosport 2 will broadcast all world ranking events plus the Wuxi Classic, World Cup and Brazilian Masters and, for the first time, six of the Players Tour Championship events held in Europe.

World Snooker chairman Barry Hearn said: “We have established new events in the continent including the German Masters ranking event and the European PTC tournaments, and we’re delighted that all of these will be screened by Eurosport. The spread of snooker in the region has been phenomenal in recent years and this is a key part of our continued efforts to make it a global sport.”

Coverage in the UK of the Masters, Welsh Open, UK Championship and World Championship is subject to specific discussions with individual rights holders on a local basis.