Reunited presenters score for UTV

ONE MORE THING:UTV'S INTERIM results this week were something of a mixed bag. While television revenues were down 2 per cent (Ireland was 8 per cent lower), its talkSPORT radio station grew turnover by 16 per cent to £17.2 million.

The Olympics yielded little by way of additional revenues, due to the BBC holding those rights.

“Most people thought that the Olympics would be good for us all,” chief executive John McCann told me yesterday. “We assumed that advertisers would want to be on around the Olympics because of the feel-good factor. That proved not to be the case.”

By contrast, talkSPORT, where former Sky Sports presenters Andy Gray and Richard Keys have been reunited, is “flying”, buoyed by a recent four-year deal for audio broadcasting rights with the Premier League in England and rights for the FA Cup.

These will be broadcast around the world in English, Spanish and Mandarin.

Deals have already been signed in Ghana, Nigeria, the US, Canada and New Zealand but McCann is keen to secure deals in Asia.

China, Malaysia and Indonesia are hotbeds of interest in the Premier League. It is well established that they like watching the Premier League on TV in those countries but are they as keen to listen to games on the radio?

“We’ll soon find out,” McCann replied with a chuckle. “It’s a pretty exciting development for us. Nobody has done this before so the model is unproven.”