By Mark Baber
December 21 – BT Sport, which surprisingly landed £738m of rights for Premier League football this summer, has named Sunset+Vine, part of the Tinopolis Group, as production company for their 38 live Premier League games for the next three seasons.
Sunset+Vine’s main competitors for the production contract had been ITV Studios and IMG. BT Vision will start broadcasting Premier league football with the start of the 2013/14 season.
The value of the deal, which also includes 69 Aviva Premiership rugby union games a season is understood to be just under £100m
This will be Sunset+Vine’s biggest contract to date – their other main football contracts have included live UEFA Europa League football for Channel Five since 2008 and domestic and international football for BBC Scotland.
Simon Green, recently appointed head of BT Sport, said: “We have chosen Sunset + Vine as our lead preferred partner on the basis of its creative approach and the quality of the team they have lined up to work on the programming.”
Led by executive producer David Tippett, with Dylan James as senior producer for football, Sunset + Vine will set up a BT-Sport dedicated team, based at the International Broadcast Centre in the Olympic Park in Stratford, London.
Jeff Foulser, the chairman of Sunset+Vine said: “We are delighted to have been awarded this very significant contract. Live football and rugby coverage have been a major part of our recent output and we can now put our creative talents into delivering top class and innovative coverage.”
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