According to EPLtalk website
ESPN has acquired the TV rights to two of the weekly Premier League slots on US television for the 2009-2010 season. Beginning on August 15, 2009, each week ESPN will feature the 7:45am ET Saturday game and the 3pm ET Monday game.
Those two weekly time slots were previously held by Setanta Sports who in the past had sub-licensed those games from Fox Soccer Channel. Despite Setanta losing the two timeslots to ESPN, Setanta US will continue showing the two 10am ET Saturday slots (one game on Setanta US, and the other on Setanta Xtra), as well as the early Sunday morning ET kickoffs and the Tuesday and Wednesday midweek Premier League matches. The games shown by Setanta will also be available on its broadband package at http://www.setanta-i.com
The article also offers some games you can expect to see, including Chelsea v Hull City on August 15th at 6:45am on ESPN2, Liverpool v Aston Villa at 2pm August 24th and Chelsea v Burnley on August 29th at 6:45am.
So to cover your bases, it looks like satellite is still the best viewing path since Mediacom hasn’t added Sentata to their Sports package, at least not to my knowledge.
Steve, do you know if the games on ESPN will be shown in HD? Even if not, at least the picture quality will be better than Setanta..
Great! Simply great! If ESPN really wants it, it can singlehandedly make football the most popular sport in the country. And, with recent TV ratings for the Confederations Cup, the network has apparently realized the high interest for the sport in the US. The summer of soccer apparently continues into the fall…
ESPN needs to do two things.
1- It needs to get rid of that annoying sports ticker on the bottom of the screen that people hate.
If people want to know the score of the baseball games, or every obscure golf or tennis tournament, they can just go on the internet and find it.
Sports fans, especially soccer fans, hate that stupid sports ticker when they are attempting to watch the games.
The sports ticker is outdated, and other stations that carry soccer, such as Fox Soccer Channel, and Gol tv, don’t have it. if ESPN/ESPN2/ESPN Deportes wants to improve their soccer ratings, they need to get rid of that annoying sports ticker. Even at the pubs, much less at home, people hate that thing.
2- ESPN/ESPN2?ESPN CLASSIC need to show not only the Dutch and German soccer games on ESPN DEPORTES but also on the English speaking stations such as ESPN/ESPN2 or ESPN CLASSIC.
Since they have those Dutch and German games anyway, why not show them on English speaking tv?
When they show the games, what time of day, is less important since many soccer fans can record the games.
It is fine to show the English Premier League on ESPN/ESPN2/ESPN CLASSIC, but also show the Dutch and German games on English speaking tv.
If ESPN/ESPN2/ESPN CLASSIC were to show one or two games each week or weekend (at whatever time of day or evening they wanted) from the English Premier league, German League, Dutch League, and Spanish La Liga, they would gain a huge number of soccer fans to their stations.
Especially if they got rid of that stupid, unecessary sports ticker. It is outdated, people just go on the internet to find out the scores of other sports events.
There is a sizeable market for soccer in the Spanish speaking community, but there is also a large and growing number of fans in America who like watching soccer with English speaking announcers, (including English speaking Hispanics, as well as the other ethnic groups).
The soccer games from England, Spain, Holland, and Germany should be on both ESPN/ESPN2/ESPN CLASSIC, as well as ESPN DEPORTES. That way the ESPN stations can get the best ratings for soccer.
And get rid of that stupid sports ticker! It is outdated!
By the way, Fox Soccer Channel, on Aug. 18th, Aug.19th, and Aug. 20th, is showing all ten games from the European Champions League qualifying playoff round. So people can pick and choose what games they want to watch. With is fantastic!