Peter Dawson, the chief executive of the R&A, which operates the Open championship, has described reports that UK pay-television broadcaster BSkyB could acquire exclusive media rights for the British golf event as “massively premature.”
UK public-service broadcaster the BBC, a long-term broadcast partner of the Open, has a rights deal for the tournament that will expire after the 2016 event.
A report in the Daily Mail newspaper earlier this week suggested that the R&A could be tempted to secure a more lucrative agreement with Sky after the pay-television broadcaster acquired live rights earlier this year for PGA Tour events until 2022.
“We have had an extremely long relationship with the BBC and a very happy one,” Dawson said, according to the Guardian newspaper. “I think it’s now 59 years since the Open was first televised on the BBC. Our contract runs through [to] the 2016 Open and what will happen thereafter remains to be seen. We obviously have to balance that long-term relationship and the high viewership of the BBC against commercial considerations. The value of golf rights has accelerated dramatically, particularly in the US just in the last 12 months, and that’s perhaps a bigger item in the equation than it might otherwise have been, but it’s massively premature to speculate on what might occur.”