Thursday 22 December 2011

Four year deal will see IEC in Sports partner with digital sports specialists on international media rights across all platforms from 2013

IEC in Sports is delighted to announce a new partnership with Perform whereby the two companies will jointly market the worldwide media rights outside North America to WTA Tour’s Premier Events from 2013.

Under the terms of the agreement, IEC in Sports will lead negotiations with broadcasters around the world whereas Perform will use its expertise to assume responsibility for the digital exploitation of the rights. The two companies will work closely to establish a distribution strategy to enable the WTA Tour to maximise both its exposure and revenue. WTA Tour and Perform formally signed their agreement today.

The partnership between IEC and Perform will provide broadcasters and media companies around the world with access to an increased number of matches, additional court coverage, newsfeeds in multiple languages, an enhanced digital offering and magazine programming.

The deal will run from 2013 to the end of 2016 and will cover the top 22 women’s events, including the season-ending finale competition, the WTA Championships, currently held in Istanbul.

The partners will begin formal discussions immediately in the New Year with both pan-regional and national broadcasters simultaneously in order to determine the best ways to maximize revenue and distribution.

Nick Haigh, Chairman of the International Board at IEC in Sports said: “We are delighted to work with Perform on its partnership with WTA Tour and such a prestigious series of rights. Tennis is a Sport we know extremely well having enjoyed a prominent role in the distribution of a large number of tennis events for well over a decade. We are also pleased to be able to extend and increase our longstanding relationship with Perform which goes back several years. We feel that this unique partnership will greatly provide strategic and commercial benefit to all parties“

“This deal will enable IEC to offer our broadcast partners a large volume of high quality tennis which fits very well with the overall IEC portfolio of rights. To do this while at the same time work with professional and cutting edge partners such as the WTA and Perform makes it even more inspiring, comments Daniel Franck, CEO of IEC in Sports.”

Commenting on the partnership with IEC in Sports, Simon Denyer, Joint-CEO of Perform said “We have a very longstanding partnership in tennis with IEC in Sports dating back to 2005 that has been extremely successful for both parties. They know day-to-day Tour tennis extremely well and we already work together on many ATP 250 and WTA International tournaments each year, so we are delighted to extend this strong relationship to cover the WTA’s Premier events. IEC in Sports will lead us in the key broadcast discussions around the world and we will also look to expand our current partnership in production and content distribution.”