America Móvil Licenses Olympic Rights in LatAm to FOX Sports, ESPN

MEXICO CITY: America Móvil has done two separate deals, with FOX Sports and ESPN, involving the rights for the 2014 and 2016 Olympic Games in Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America.

ESPN picked up the non-exclusive pay-TV and digital rights for the Sochi 2014 Winter Games and Rio 2016 Summer Games in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. ESPN will air the Olympics across multiple TV networks and on its ESPN Play service. Highlights will also run on espn.com.

FOX Sports scored the rights for the Sochi and Rio Games across all Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America via its TV and online offerings. Coverage will span FOX Sports, FOX Sports 2, FOX Sports 3 and the Fox Play service.

“Our main objective for the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi and the Summer Olympic Games in Brazil is to innovate and widen the options so that more people can enjoy the Olympics, which today, thanks to technology, are possible to follow on television as well as on cell phones, as today’s agreement with ESPN announces,” said Arturo Elias, the managing director of UNO Noticias.
 
“This agreement offers us with a tremendous opportunity to serve sports fans in Latin America,” added Tim Bunnell, the senior VP of production, programming, marketing and ad sales at ESPN International. “The Olympic Games are at the pinnacle of all sporting events and I am pleased that ESPN can utilize and leverage its platforms to showcase an event of this magnitude to fans in the region.”

“It is very important for a pan-regional sports service like FOX Sports to always offer the best local and international sporting events, together with the best news and talk programming, and Fox’s coverage of the Olympic Games will be a combination of both,” said Carlos Martinez, the president of FOX International Channels Latin America. “We are very excited that the 2016 Games will be in our backyard. We will optimize our local facilities in Rio de Janeiro and make FOX Sports the number one Olympics destination in the region for fans and viewers seeking Olympics content.”
 
Elias, remarked: “América Móvil is focused on innovating and leveraging all technological platforms, and on the creation of alliances like the one we announce today with FOX Sports. By doing this, more people will have access to the Summer and Winter Olympic games, with several choices from a wide variety of platforms and screens, ranging from TV sets to mobile phones.”