NBC scores Premier League soccer

NBC has beaten Fox and ESPN to the US rights for live English Premier League football in a US$250m deal, following an improved third quarter financial performance.

The Peacock will show every match from the Premier League live either on TV or online for three years starting with the 2013/14 season. The move follows the success of its US Major League Soccer coverage, which began last year.

NBC will show six live matches a week on its NBC Sports Network and other cable channels and the rest will be shown online.

The deal is more than three-times the US$80m that Fox was paid for the last three-year live rights deal which saw coverage split between the Fox Soccer channel and ESPN.

It continues the recent trend for Premier League rights sales, which have exploded in value this year – in the UK an aggressive push into the market from BT drove the value of the domestic deal up to £3bn (US$4.7bn) for three years from £1.25bn.

The move follows an improved financial performance from NBCUniversal (NBCU).

Parent company Comcast’s Q3 earnings, released on Friday, showed net income of US$2.11bn, up from US$908m in the same period last year and revenues of US$16.54bn, up 15%.

This was helped by a 31.2% rise in NBCU’s revenues to US$6.82bn, with broadcast revenue up 83.8% to US$2.78bn and cable nets up 23.6% to US$1.36bn.

The improved performance was in part attributed to NBC carrying the Olympics, which generated US$1.19bn in revenue.

The overall Comcast figures were also boosted by the US$3bn sale of NBCU’s stake in A+E Networks and the sale of spectrum worth US$3.6bn to Verizon Wireless.

NBCU CEO Steve Burke told investors he felt NBC was doing better but was still “underperforming” and that broadcast profits could be higher.