New Soccer Net BeIN Sport Launches on DirecTV

Startup soccer network BeIN Sport's first U.S. carriage is
on DirecTV, the programmer announced.

The new channel, backed by Al Jazeera Sports and other
investors, has obtained rights to several leading European leagues and
tournaments, and said its Saturday telecasts will include matches from Spain's
La Liga and France's Ligue Un. It said a full schedule will be posted on http://beinsport.tv/.
It also said it is searching out rights to other sports events in addition to
soccer.

The English-language version will appear in high definition
and standard definition in the DirecTV Sports Pack. An "entirely
differentiated" Spanish-language version will be part of DirecTV Más in
SD. The channels kick off at 7:30 p.m. EST today, it said. The DirecTV channel
location is 620, according to the programmer.

Channel officials have previously
said
two major distribution deals were in place, of which this is
presumably the first.

Kent Gibbons

Kent has been a journalist, writer and editor at Multichannel News since 1994 and with Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He is a good point of contact for anything editorial at the publications and for Nexttv.com. Before joining Multichannel News he had been a newspaper reporter with publications including The Washington Times, The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal and North County News.