Premier League<\/a> game at 3pm, followed by rugby matches involving the provinces at 5.30pm and 7.30\/8pm.<\/p>\nPremier Sport will attempt to show every one of the dozen Champions Cup matches in each pool round live, except if they clash with a Challenge Cup game involving Connacht or Ulster. <\/p>\n
RT\u00c9 will not show a solitary minute of the provinces\u2019 games for at least the next two seasons and there is a certain irony in this given Nugent was Head of Sport in Montrose from 2010 to 2018. But he denied that he insisted on exclusive coverage, per se, and more that Premier Sports successfully bid on what they were offered by the EPCR.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a subtlety in the answer to that question. Our model would be to have exclusivity, but we are showing in our URC coverage that we also operate on a non-exclusive basis. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo, our first starting point, if we can afford to buy exclusivity, is to buy exclusivity. If we can\u2019t, or there is a requirement from the governing body to keep free-to-air in it and they\u2019re only prepared to sell part of their wares, then we only buy part of their wares. But that\u2019s not our decision, it\u2019s the decision of the governing body of how they package and sell.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for the bigger picture of the provinces vanishing from English-speaking terrestrial television, which is not his concern, Nugent points out that URC games involving the provinces will be on TG4 in every round. <\/p>\n
\u201cSecondly, whether you like it or not, professional sport is built around commercial revenues, and for the vast majority of the major sports \u2013 whether that is soccer, rugby, probably to a slightly lesser extent GAA \u2013 the primary earner for that is broadcast revenues.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd with the best will in the world, RT\u00c9, BBC, TV5 in France, any of the public-service broadcasters, those days of them funding or underpinning an entire sport are simply not there any more. It requires a village to fund the government, and that\u2019s where we are now,\u201d said Nugent, pointing out that no broadcasting company, be it Premier, TNT or Sky, can \u201cdo it all\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thought of anything now being on free-to-air on a permanent basis in its entirety, I just don\u2019t see that happening in any market anywhere,\u201d he added. \u201cSo, it\u2019s not a particularly Irish issue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Where Irish viewers might previously have considered Premier Sports to be a UK-based option in Ireland, that\u2019s no long the case in light of Premier Sports buying back the English arm of the company (for a much smaller figure) from Viaplay.<\/p>\n
As a consequence, Premier Sports 1 has become a stand-alone Irish channel, with Champions League, Premier League and Europa League matches all available (some exclusively) in Ireland which are not in the UK, while Premier Sports 2 is available in both. <\/p>\n
The Irish-based arm of the company was plunged in at the deep end last season, such was the volume of rugby matches it broadcast.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast season we were looking at the side of a cliff for half the year. It was about just making sure we didn\u2019t stuff it up,\u201d admitted Nugent, who said the forthcoming season is about \u201cbedding in\u201d with a couple of as yet unnamed pundits to add to Ian Madigan, Simon Zebo, Stephen Ferris, Andrew Trimble, John Barclay, Tom Shanklin and Shane Williams. <\/p>\n
He also confirmed there will not be a weekly highlights or magazine programme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ryle Nugent, CEO of Premier Sports Ireland, has declared the pay-per-view broadcaster is now the home of Irish…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58660,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[18,19,17,132,42271],"class_list":{"0":"post-58659","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-united-rugby-championship"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}