13 August 2007
Tiscali has joined forces with Setanta to offer its viewers Premier League football coverage, it has emerged.
The UK's fourth-largest broadband provider is teaming up with the Irish broadcaster to add live football to its existing digital TV services.
The deal is further good news for Italian company Tiscali, which recently acquired new channels from BSkyB after they were pulled from Virgin Media following a public row over payment.
Tiscali recently gained 500,000 broadband customers after a deal with independent broadband base, Pipex, and was voted seventh in terms of customer service in a recent uSwitch poll.
This is the latest development in a flurry of recent bidding wars to secure rights to screen crowd-pulling events such as football matches by BT, Carphone Warehouse, Virgin Media and Sky.
Setanta won the rights to two sets of matches in an auction last year from rival broadcaster Sky, while BT Vision has also tied-up with Setanta to offer 46 live games and 242 "near live" matches.