TORONTO — Mediapro Canada announced today it has signed an exclusive media rights agreement with new Mexican sports broadcaster Hi! Sports TV for a wide-ranging package of Canadian soccer including live coverage of Canadian Premier League (CPL) games and the Canadian Championship.
Hi! Sports TV is owned by the PMKT agency and carried across Mexico on Totalplay, the IPTV pay-TV platform controlled by the Grupo Salinas conglomerate, which owns Mexican network TV Azteca, explains a press release.
“The deal means that over 3 million Totalplay subscribers across Mexico will have access to exclusive live coverage on Hi! Sports TV (Ch. 517) of the Canadian Premier League (CPL), Canada’s first division men’s professional league; the Canadian Championship, the tournament for all Canadian professional men’s soccer clubs, including the three teams that play in Major League Soccer (Toronto FC, CF Montréal and Vancouver Whitecaps); and the home friendlies of Canada Soccer’s Men’s and Women’s national teams,” the release reads.
This year, the rights agreement will see Hi! Sports TV air live coverage of all 117 games in the CPL, as well as 12 Canadian Championship matches and up to eight home friendly matches of Canada Soccer’s men’s and women’s national teams, “all complemented by a range of studio and panel shows” produced by OneSoccer, Mediapro Canada’s dedicated soccer channel.
Hi! Sports TV is promoting its CPL soccer coverage using the #OlaGélida (#FrozenWave) hashtag, “with comprehensive and colourful social media promotions, in a move designed to draw fans to the dynamic and exciting spectacle of Canada’s coast-to-coast soccer league, now entering its fourth season,” the release says.
The CPL currently features a number of Mexican and Central American players, including Mexico’s Alejandro Díaz (above, left) of the 2021 CPL champion team Pacific FC.
“Mexicans are passionate and knowledgeable fans of the beautiful game, and we’re confident they will be surprised and delighted by what the CPL has to offer,” said Oscar López, CEO of Mediapro Canada, in the release.
“We are excited to be working with Hi! Sports TV, a bold new entrant into the Mexican sports broadcasting market, and we think their ‘hyper-connected’ approach, amplifying all their content consistently across social media, will enable Canadian soccer to gain a dedicated following,” López said.
Hi! Sports TV is “connecting with sports communities across the country through innovation — by being irreverent, disruptive and different,” said Hussein Forzán, managing director of Hi! Sports TV.
“Our style is to create new personalities, new voices and to give airtime to competitions and leagues that are trending in the world of sport. New colours, formats, graphics; leaning in to the world of spectacle and entertainment — that is what Hi! Sports is about.”
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Photo supplied by Mediapro Canada.
