RTE lose rights to show US Majors

THE rights to cover American golf Majors, the US Open and the US PGA, have been lost by RTE following London based satellite station BSkyB's successful negotiation of an exclusive deal to broadcast the events in this part of the world.

Next week's US Open would normally have been covered by RTE but under the terms of Sky's deal with the tournament's organisers they will have no access to either it or the US PGA, which, takes place in early August.

The latest expansion by Sky's sports organisation cuts the number of golf tournaments which RTE is committed to carrying live coverage of to just four, with the British Open, the US Masters and the two Irish based events - the Irish Open and European Open. This would almost certainly be cut to three next year if the European Open is moved out of Ireland.

RTE's head of television sport, Tim O'Connor, played down the significance of this latest shift in the marketplace yesterday, observing that "our audiences for the US Open and US PGA were so marginal anyway that it was highly questionable as to whether they were worth the airspace. That's a dilemma that we don't have to face for 1996 or 1997 now because of this move."

He pointed out that, with the European Championships due to start this weekend the scheduling of US Open coverage would have been particularly difficult this year while adding that "as it is we are going to be doing about 200 more hours of sport than we would normally do in a year."

The presence of so much football in the forthcoming schedule would, on the face of it, represent a considerable boost to the station with major internationals - especially those involving Ireland - drawing far larger audiences than golf in this country.

"In the ratings, golf would always be in single figures and usually below five per cent as against the 13 per cent of potential viewers we got for the Sunday Game last week, while a soccer international would be something like 14 or 15 per cent up to about 25 per cent, depending on whether we are winning, or not," he said.

One area where things seem likely to improve in golfing terms, however, is the Ryder Cup with the station confident that a deal will be done to restore some live coverage of the event to RTE by the time it is held again next year. "It's not a done deal, but I'm hopeful," says O'Connor.

Another area of considerable uncertainty for RTE is the status of their English soccer coverage with Sky "pulling the plug" on their coverage of Saturday games last season and also preventing the station from broadcasting FA Cup matches where it clashed with one of their own live transmissions.

Within the next fortnight there will also be an announcement from FIFA regarding the worldwide television rights to the 2002 World Cup which has just been jointly awarded to Japan and South Korea.

RTE, through their membership of the European Broadcasting Union, are part of a National Broadcasters Consortium which faces opposition from Rupert Murdoch's Fox organisation, Disney, IMG and European Champions League co-ordinators TEAM.

In the longer term, the station faces doubts over access to international rugby, with one year remaining on their contract to cover the five nations championship, on which O'Connor admits that the station may be vulnerable in this area.

More serious still for the Montrose station is the planned entry next year of TV3, with its backing from UTV, into the market and this, concedes O'Connor, is likely to have a major impact on the station's sporting options.