MP & Silva (MPS), the leading international sports media company, and Arsenal Broadband Limited (ABL), the digital arm of Arsenal FC, have agreed an extension to their existing six year deal, which will now run through until 2018/19.
Under the new deal, MP & Silva will continue to distribute the club’s international programming block (The Arsenal Media Channel) and remains the club’s strategic media advisor.
The new deal follows on from the announcement earlier this year that in the 2013/14 season, MP & Silva delivered a record distribution of the Arsenal Media Channel to 130 territories in five continents, covering a potential audience reach of 392 million households in Europe, Asia-Pacific, MENA, Latin America and North America.
The Arsenal Media Channel is the club’s weekly three-hour international programming block, produced in high definition, and consists of delayed match coverage from all domestic competitions, news, interviews and behind-the-scenes club life stories. MP & Silva will continue to distribute this content worldwide, across all platforms, excluding mobile.
The extension cements an extremely strong relationship between the two parties that continues to deliver the broadest possible reach for Arsenal content to its fans across the globe. Under the original deal, MP & Silva had helped Arsenal to establish an in-house production unit, which now creates weekly content for the international programming block and across all of Arsenal’s platforms, including social media.
In an ever-changing media market, this has enabled Arsenal to create both platform specific and localised content for different markets, which is integral to the club’s domestic and international development strategies.
As under the existing deal, MP & Silva will also continue to advise the club on how it engages the Arsenal fanbase, with relevant, entertaining content across multiple channels in international markets - with a common goal to create the very best in football club content.
MP & Silva also, under a separate deal with the club, distributes both Arsenal’s pre-season match programme and the Emirates Cup, one of football’s pre-eminent pre-season club tournaments. The 2014 edition will be the event’s seventh staging.
"We are extremely pleased to be renewing our long term strategic media partnership with MP & Silva two years early and for an additional four-year term,” said Tom Fox, Arsenal’s chief commercial officer. “This partnership has already enabled us to dramatically improve the production values and global distribution of our club content to satisfy the demand of our tens of millions of fans worldwide.
"We are selective about who we partner with at Arsenal and we are proud of our association with one of the leading sports media companies in the world. We look forward to an exciting future together."
Riccardo Silva, MP & Silva founding partner, said: “We’re delighted to continue to work with Arsenal to provide original content, which we will jointly create to serve the fragmented way that the club's 30 million supporters around the world experience their media. Sharing the knowledge and skills in our two organisations is a great combination, as we look to move from the traditional television-centric approach, towards a broader multi-platform experience.”
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