TVP, the Polish public-service broadcaster, has secured rights to top-tier International Biathlon Union (IBU) events until 2026, including the IBU World Championships and the IBU Cup.
The free-to-air (FTA) network takes over from the IBU’s previous partners in the country, pan-European broadcaster Eurosport and pay television's Polsat, who hold rights in the 2018-22 broadcast cycle.
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TVP will cover 58 World Cup races and 12 World Championships each season.
The events will be shown on TVP Sport’s linear channels, as well as the TVPSport.pl online site and on the broadcaster’s mobile apps.
Polsat covered IBU action during both the 2014-18 and 2018-22 cycles.
Marek Szkolnikowski, a TVP Sport director, said: “Biathlon is a great sports spectacle with frequent twists and turns … This is another important license that we have acquired in the increasingly difficult sports rights market.”
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By GlobalDataOlle Dahlin, the IBU’s president, added: “Knowing how enthusiastically Polish viewers are about winter sports, we sincerely hope that the open channel broadcasts and cooperation with TVP will be the beginning of a new era of biathlon in Poland.”
In early 2020, the European Broadcasting Union’s sports arm Eurovision Sport, of which TVP is a member organization, renewed its long-standing free-to-air deal with the IBU from 2022-23 to 2025-26.
However, by that point, the current IBU deal with Polsat had already been struck.
Eurovision Sport has held IBU rights since 2002.
In October last year, TVP secured rights to the ongoing Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, China, through a sub-licensing deal with US media giant Discovery.
The deal came as a result of regulations in the country’s Broadcasting Act stating that an Olympic Games with Polish participation must be at least part-shown on free-to-air TV.
Discovery, through its ownership of Eurosport and its new over-the-top streaming platform Discovery+, holds rights to action from the Beijing Olympics through its four-games, €1.3 billion ($1.6 billion) European rights deal struck with the IOC in 2015, which covers 50 countries and runs to 2024, having begun with the 2018 Winter games in Pyeongchang.
As in its other sub-licensing agreements, Discovery has still retained rights in Poland to air all the action from the Olympics on its pay-TV and digital platforms.
