TORONTO – Errol Hinds spent the early part of this summer assuring people that Setanta Canada was doing just fine, thanks.
The reason? The company’s U.K. subsidiary went under, losing English Premier League soccer and other rights on its way to the dustbin.
“I don’t know a huge amount of what happened there,” said Hinds, Setanta Canada’s general manager in a recent interview with Cartt.ca of the British Setanta channel. “The way Setanta is set up though is that it is different entities in different countries… so our rights deals were independent of the English company.”
However, that bit of bad news from across the pond had nothing to do with the brand’s North American operations, said Hinds, and Canadian fans of EPL know that when the new season began last week, Setanta was the channel they needed if they wanted their footy action (the channel airs hundreds of soccer matches per year).
The linear Canadian channel, a joint venture with Rogers Broadcasting which owns the rights to a ton of high profile European sports content (primarily soccer and rugby), is going into its second year and is carried by just about all major and minor Canadian distributors except one, Videotron.
Despite that, Hinds (pictured) says he is satisfied with results so far. “We’re working with Videotron to get on their lineup obviously,” he said. “But, we’re very happy. Other than Videotron, the uptake (from a consumer level) has exceeded the expectations we had coming into this.”
– Greg O’Brien
