[cheekyangus]

I agree with Raider999, I don't think Sky lost La Liga. Same way they didn't lose ATP Tennis. They've only got so much space to fill, existing rights get more expensive and certain sports have inconvenience scheduling, they either clash with higher rating events or take too much time to show. They also need to give the illusion of variety, so they can't just show football.

BT Sport is the same. It's juggling budget, audience perception and scheduling. Eurosport takes a different approach, it predominantly shows sports that take large chunks of schedule to do properly, hence cycling, tennis and snooker.

Notice how Sky sponsored a pro cycling team for years but never showed an interest in broadcasting it. There are a lot of events and they can take many hours to even show just one. Sky knew they didn't have the space to schedule it and the audience wasn't necessarily big enough to justify a dedicated channel (remember the Bike channel that existed but folded in recent years).

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Sorry for going off thread topic.

Still no sign of the STV HD 103 switch. Guess either the information was wrong, or it was postponed due to technical difficulties.

I suspect if Discovery end up with the 3 channels mentioned in that article they will end up closing them, or their own channels with similar subject matter.