{"id":3584,"date":"2009-08-01T11:18:11","date_gmt":"2009-08-01T10:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=3584"},"modified":"2009-10-18T15:28:35","modified_gmt":"2009-10-18T14:28:35","slug":"espn-america-continues-in-the-uk-further-reaction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=3584","title":{"rendered":"ESPN America continues in the UK: further reaction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night’s news that ESPN America will continue to be available on British screens came as a considerable relief.\u00c2\u00a0 The espn.co.uk<\/a> website has been updated slowly over the past week with new sports being added to their roster, while an actual schedule has still not been published.\u00c2\u00a0 All of which raised fears that MLB and other North American sports would be shoehorned onto the new football-dominated channel, battling for spare time slots alongside French League Rugby and German Touring Car races.<\/p>\n

Combined with the continuing lack of free-to-air coverage of MLB, the result would have been little short of disastrous.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

As it is, ESPN America subscribers can simply continue to watch the channel as per normal.\u00c2\u00a0 Sky subscribers who have enjoyed watching it for free since the demise of Setanta Sports will now need to pay up, but that was always going to be the case.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

As mentioned yesterday, ESPN America will be packaged with the new ESPN and ESPN-HD channels.\u00c2\u00a0 Details on how to subscribe with Sky (\u00c2\u00a39 per month for Sky Sports subscribers, \u00c2\u00a312 per month otherwise) and Virgin Media (various different M, L and XL subscription options) have been published on the ESPN America website<\/a>, although there’s no news yet for BT vision and Top-Up TV customers.\u00c2\u00a0 It was reported<\/a> yesterday in the Guardian that agreements with these services are close to being agreed, although we don’t yet know whether that will include ESPN America or just the new ESPN channel.<\/p>\n

Another very interesting report<\/a> on the Daily Telegraph website claims that the new channel will be available for free to existing Sky and Virgin Media customers throughout August.\u00c2\u00a0 Again, we don’t yet know whether ESPN America will be part of this.\u00c2\u00a0 It would certainly make sense for ESPN to allow potential customers a chance to see what their new channel has to offer and hopefully that ‘taster’ will extend to the whole ESPN package.<\/p>\n

While the inclusion of North American sports on the new ESPN channel had previously been the cause of some concern, it now looks like being a great added extra.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s unlikely that this will lead to more MLB games being shown (i.e. it doesn’t make much sense for them to show competing MLB games on two channels at the same time), but it does mean that some baseball will be available in HD to those who have the capability to watch it.\u00c2\u00a0 For example, depending on whether it clashes with other programmes on any given Sunday, there’s a decent chance that ESPN Sunday Night Baseball will be available in HD, which I’m sure will be excellent news for some people.<\/p>\n

So we don’t have to worry about tomorrow being the last day of ESPN America in Britain.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead, the overall package may actually be slightly better.\u00c2\u00a0 All we need now is for a free-to-air channel to step in and obtain the rights to show the World Series (and other postseason games?) and we can once again be positive about the sport moving forward in the UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night’s news that ESPN America will continue to be available on British screens came as a considerable relief.\u00c2\u00a0 The espn.co.uk website has been updated slowly over the past week with new sports being added to their roster, while an actual schedule has still not been published.\u00c2\u00a0 All of which raised fears that MLB and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[25,553],"class_list":["post-3584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball-coverage","tag-espn-america","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3584"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5208,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3584\/revisions\/5208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}