Facebook to stream Spanish football to Indian subcontinent

Written by NTN staff

14/08/18

Another sports streaming deal for Facebook as the social platform will show top flight Spanish football to the sub-Indian continent.

Facebook has signed an exclusive deal to show every La Liga game, for the next three seasons, to viewers in India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, The Maldives, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

Apart from the live matches, shoulder programming, including weekly preview shows and highlights, will also be showcased.

Although the value of the deal was not disclosed, Reuters reports that the last time they were for sale in 2014 they were bought for $32 million. The rights were previously held by Sony Pictures Network.

Like the English Premier League, the Spanish equivalent is keep to tap into a growing global demographic via social networks and digital platforms in general. Facebook has 348 million users in the region, of whom 270m are in India.

Facebook recently struck a content partnership with Eleven Sports to stream one free-to-air match each week drawn from the Spanish La Liga and Italian Serie to UK members of the global social network. It already shows Major League Baseball (MLB) to US audiences at a reported cost of $1m per game.

The company’s director of global live sports, Peter Hutton, told Reuters the La Liga streams would at first be advertising-free, but it was considering how best to implement them in future.

“It’s not something that is a big threat to broadcast world,” said Hutton, which not many people believe any more.