Hot on the heels of numerous recent announcements for the IAAF World Athletics Series, IEC in Sports, the Stockholm-based media rights expert, is proud to announce a major new signing with RAI, the Italian Public Service Broadcaster.

Under the terms of the agreement, RAI will air the World Indoor Championships from Doha next week and is already in advanced talks with IEC to clear the rights to the remaining IAAF WAS Events up to the end of the agency’s current term at the end of 2013.

Jonas Persson, IEC’s CEO, welcomed the deal, saying “RAI and IEC in Sports have a long history of positive co-operation together. RAI was always our preferred choice in the Italian marketplace and whilst we had other interest from the market, we were delighted RAI’s commercial proposal met with our and our client, IAAF’s needs. We now hopefully look forward to the quick finalization of the rest of the Events up to the end of our current term ending 2013.”

IEC’s deal with RAI also represents major progress in a major market, where an EBU member once again agrees a deal with IEC, meeting the agency’s commercial expectations. The RAI deal follows other significant EBU member signings IEC has conducted, which include SVT/TV4 in Sweden, ERT in Greece, YLE in Finland, RTP in Portugal, not to mention the other well-publicized non-EBU member deals the Lagardère Sports-owned agency has inked, most recently with French DTT broadcaster Direct 8 and UK Pay-TV station, ESPN.