United Kingdom: Premier Sports to recover its activities from Viaplay by "early 2024"

The British free and pay-TV group Premier Sports is to take over its activities in the UK from the Swedish audiovisual group Viaplay, it announced on 29/11/2023. Premier Sports is expected to be back in business in "early 2024", subject to the approval of the UK Competition Authority.

Viaplay originally acquired Premier Sports in a deal valued at £30m (€34.7m) on 21/07/2022. The Swedish group acquired the media rights held by Premier Sports in the UK and Ireland. The pay-TV channels Premier Sports 1, Premier Sports 2 and the free-TV channel FreeSports became Viaplay Sports 1, Viaplay Sports 2 and Viaplay Xtra respectively. By re-establishing its operations in these territories, Premier Sports will once again use its three original channels and launch a "newly enhanced" streaming service.

"We are conducting an immediate strategic review of the entire business to consider all options including content sublicensing, asset disposals, equity injections or the sale of the whole Group," said Jorgen Madsen Lindemann on 20/07/2023, while the group had announced the redundancy of 25% of its…