Good news breaking from Wembley today as the BBC have announced that they will continue to broadcast snooker’s biggest tournament’s for the next three years…
To read the official press releases you can visit both the BBC and the World Snooker websites.
To summarise, the BBC will continue to televise the World Championship, UK Championship and Masters tournaments as they have done already for so long, whilst they will continue their coverage of the Welsh Open over on their BBC Wales channel.
As expected however, this means that they will not continue to broadcast the World Open, although it is hoped that a new international venue and broadcaster will be announced during the coming weeks for that tournament.
That dampener notwithstanding, the announcement is undoubtedly good news for a sport which relies heavily on the guaranteed revenue generated by this contract.
Furthermore whilst I do have my moans about the BBC’s coverage of their events, it would be hard to find another broadcaster who could match up to what they do, both in terms of the amount of hours coverage they offer on their interactive channels as well as online and also in terms of quality.
It will be interesting now to see whether a new deal will be announced with Eurosport in the near future regarding their contract to broadcast events which has tended to run alongside that of the BBC.