World Snooker & IMG extend Eurosport partnership

World Snooker, IMG Media and Eurosport have extended their long term partnership for an additional five seasons in a deal running up to 2015-2016. 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 Championships, 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 (with some exceptions in the UK, where the BBC remains in the pound seats).

Eurosport has broadcast snooker since 2003 and last season over 500 hours of snooker were broadcast on the channel, 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: “IMG has negotiated a fantastic deal for snooker and gives further momentum to the growth of the sport throughout Europe and beyond.”

“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.”