8 Niche TV Streaming Networks That You Didn't Know Existed

Focus – Continental Football

The football television market is hugely fragmented in the UK. Sky Sports still have a monopoly on the Football League and hold the lion’s share of the Premier League rights, shared with BT (and Amazon from next season onwards), who supplement their offering with exclusive coverage of the UEFA Champions League, Europa League, the German Bundesliga and French Ligue A. Elsewhere the BBC and ITV still cling to selected matches from the FA Cup and England internationals respectively.

For those whose football addiction cannot be satisfied by the duo, a new party has been gradually emerging, airing their coverage solely through a streaming platform rather than a traditional television channel. Eleven Sports now hold the exclusive rights to the Spanish La Liga and Italian Serie A, having taken them from Sky and BT respectively last year to supplement their airing of the Dutch Eredivise, Swedish Allsvenskan and Chinese Super League. They will soon assume the rights to Major League Soccer as well.

Owned by Leeds United chairman Andreas Radrizzani, Eleven Sports could easily collapse in a manner similar to Setanta, but given their capitalisation of streaming they could just as easily succeed in an arena where Sky and BT have made little effort to do anything groundbreaking.

There is little else they could pursue right now, however, aside from secondary cup competitions and even more obscure leagues (the Portuguese Primeira Liga and Polish Ekstraklasa are amongst those currently aired by even smaller broadcasters). Greek football anyone?