Setanta Sports 1 & 2

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Setanta Sports 1, Setanta Sports 2
Setanta Sports logo
Launched 2004
Owned by Setanta Sports
Audience share 0.2% (SS1)
0.0% (SS2)
(March 2008, BARB)
Slogan Setanta is Sport / The new home of Boxing
Country Ireland
Sister channel(s) Setanta Golf
Website www.setanta.com
Availability
Terrestrial
Freeview Channel 34 (SS1)
(VIEWING CARD REQUIRED)
Satellite
Sky Digital Channel 429 (SS1) (UK)
Channel 434 (SS1) (ROI)
Channel 430 (SS2)
Cable
Virgin Media Channel 538 (SS1)
Channel 539 (SS2)
UPC Ireland Channel 406 (SS1)
Channel 409 (SS2)
IPTV over ADSL
Tiscali TV Channel 555 (SS1)
Channel 556 (SS2)

Setanta Sports 1 & 2 are the two main Channels for Setanta Sports in the Republic of Ireland and United Kingdom, carrying coverage of association football (including the English Premier League, Scottish Premier League, top-flight European leagues and UEFA Cup), boxing, mixed martial arts, golf, motorsport, coverage of the Gaelic Athletic Association and international cricket.


Contents

[edit] Broadcast Rights

European League Football - France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Scotland (60 games per season), England (46 premier league games + conference action).

Rugby union from the Magners League and the French Top 14.

Setanta has the rights to televise rugby league in Australasia from the National Rugby League and State of Origin since 2007 outbidding Sky.

Golf from the US PGA TOUR.

Setanta has won exclusive rights in Ireland and the UK to air the U.S. PGA Tour golf for six years from 2007 for a reported cost of £103 million. The deal also includes the Champions Tour and the Nationwide Tour events, but it does not include the major championships. Setanta established a specialist golf channel to present its coverage, Setanta Golf.

Setanta was one of two broadcasters (the other being Sky) to secure rights to show live English Premiership football in Ireland and the UK from August 2007 to August 2010. It was awarded two of the six packages into which the rights had been divided under an agreement between the FA Premier League and the European Commission. Setanta also won exclusive rights to air, strictly for viewers in the Republic of Ireland only, a live Saturday afternoon match with a 3pm kickoff time (although it had already been doing that under the previous contract).

Setanta has won exclusive rights in Ireland and the UK to air the U.S. PGA Tour golf for six years from 2007 for a reported cost of £103 million. The deal also includes the Champions Tour and the Nationwide Tour events, but it does not include the major championships. Setanta established a specialist golf channel to present its coverage, Setanta Golf.

Setanta were the exclusive multi-channel broadcasters of the RBS 6 Nations 2007 highlights programme, every match weekend. Rhodri Williams anchored coverage, with match commentary and graphics from the BBC coverage.

Setanta has also won the rights to the Australian rules football season and the British Touring Car Championship.

On 30 March 2007, Setanta, along with ITV, won a deal with the Football Association to show live coverage of the FA Cup and England home friendlies from the 2007/8 season for four years.

Their coverage of the FA Cup will comprise:

  • Three games and one replay per round in the 3rd, 4th and 5th rounds of the FA Cup;
  • Two Quarter-finals and one Quarter-final replay (if any are required);
  • One semi-final; and
  • the Final (shared with ITV).

The remainder of the contract covers:

  • Three home England international friendlies in years 1 and 2 (and 2 in years 3 and 4) of the contract;
  • the Community Shield;
  • all England U21/B games.

[edit] Other

Setanta Sports signed former Sky Sports' commentator Ian Crocker who joined their broadcasters for the 2006/07 season, focusing mainly on covering SPL matches, and for the 2007/08 season they are moving on to the cover both the English Premiership and the SPL.

Setanta is the sponsor of the Setanta Sports Cup, an annual soccer tournament featuring teams from the Football League of Ireland and Irish Football League. The top 4 teams from each league are drawn into a 4 team group with 2 teams from each league. In the group stages, each team plays each other 2 times (home and away) and the top 2 qualify for the semi-final. The semi-finals are played at Windsor Park, Belfast and Turners Cross, Cork. The Final is played at Tolka Park, Dublin. It also sponsors the Conference League Cup, called the Setanta Shield.

Concerns have been raised over the security and viability of Setanta's digital terrestrial channel provided by Top Up TV because the encryption system was switched from the MediaGuard encryption system (which was cracked in continental Europe in 2004) to the Nagravision encryption system according to the conditional access manufacturer Kudelski.[1] Like Mediaguard, the different versions of Nagravision are insecure and have also been compromised according to media industry studies, external appraisals[2]and numerous discussion websites. The key-based encryption systems, like Nagravison, are fundamentally insecure because the keys and control words necessary to decrypt the television signal are themselves broadcast by the service provider. It is therefore very much easier for hackers to intercept the keys and reverse engineer the smartcards needed to hack the system.

In the United Kingdom, advanced conditional access modules for digital televisions and personal video recorders, such as the Dragon, T-Rex and Reality CAMs, that can easily decrypt Nagravision encryptions systems are freely on sale directly from suppliers and on the UK version of eBay. In addition, cloned smartcards for set top boxes that can decrypt Nagravision are now readily available and are already being traded on certain illicit websites within the UK. This has led to growing speculation that digital terrestrial pay-TV piracy is increasing within the United Kingdom during the 2007/2008 football season due to the much greater use of these public hack cloned cards and advanced conditional access modules.

Sky's own Sky Italia service suffered heavy losses due to piracy[3][4][5] and more than 3 million Italian homes accessed pay-TV services through hacked decoder cards for conditional access set top boxes and conditional access modules for digital televisions and personal video recorders. Sky Italia had to switch from an insecure key-based system to the secure Videoguard cryptographic algorithm encryption system. This issue has been covered by the Guardian and Financial Times newspapers and the Datamonitor commercial analysis group.

[edit] Availability

Setanta Sports 1 is available on all major UK digital television platforms.

  • On digital terrestrial television, Setanta Sports 1 is available as a standalone subscription channel, available to viewers with a compatible "Freeview" receiver. These include set-top boxes with a card slot, and IDTVs with a CAM. The channel broadcasts between 12:00 and 03:00;
  • BT Vision offer the version of Setanta Sports 1 carried on DTT as part of the BT Vision Sport package, which combines the channel with a broadband on-demand highlights service;
  • The entire Setanta Sports family of channels is available via satellite on Sky;
  • Setanta Sports is available free to Virgin Media subscribers on the cable company's premium subscription package (XL), and to other subscribers for a monthly fee.
  • Setanta is reportedly in talks with Tiscali TV regarding carriage of the service.[6]

In June 2007, Setanta Sports 1 broadcast some programming without encryption on DTT, allowing Freeview viewers the opportunity to sample programming. The channel is not, however, a "Freeview channel".[2]

[edit] Talent

The following is a list of some of the current on-air staff employed by Setanta Sports:

[edit] Football

[edit] Presenters

[edit] Pundits

[edit] Commentators

[edit] Co-Commentators

[edit] Reporters

[edit] Rugby Union

[edit] Presenters

[edit] Boxing

[edit] Presenters

[edit] Pundits

[edit] Commentators

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Setanta sports channel faces piracy challenge Brand Republic News
  2. ^ What is Nagravision?
  3. ^ Murdoch's Italian pay-TV venture is on cours The Guardian
  4. ^ Italy - Sky Italia service facing serious piracy threat Europe Intelligence Wir] (March , 2004)]
  5. ^ http://www.kudelski.com/pressreleases/get_pdf.php?id=1113556992_64
  6. ^ [1]

[edit] External links

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Setanta Sports