Setanta Sports

What is Setanta Sports?

Setanta Sports is a subscription sport service with a Georgian-language site. On that site it describes itself as a digital subscription service oriented towards sports enthusiasts, offering exclusive and diverse sports content, and giving access to a video library and live broadcasts. It states that it currently broadcasts in 15 countries across Europe and Asia.^[1] Those are the service's own statements about itself and no independent confirmation of the country figure was retrieved.

The corporate entity behind the Georgian operation is named in a place other than the service's own footer. La Gazzetta dello Sport Georgia states on its own about page that it “is published by Setanta Sports Media LLC with a local newsroom”, and that use of the La Gazzetta dello Sport trademark is permitted under a licence agreement with RCS Mediagroup SpA.^[3] No legal-entity or registration detail was retrievable from the Georgian Setanta site itself.^[1]

Television and radio broadcasters operating in Georgia report to the Georgian National Communications Commission, which publishes monitoring findings and sets statistical reporting requirements covering sources of financing and paid and free services.^[4]

What does Setanta Sports cover?

The Georgian site lists the competitions it carries: the Premier League, the Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and the Champions League in football, and the NBA, the NHL, UFC, Formula 1, the WTA and ATP tours and Wimbledon outside it.^[1]

One of those carries a dated anchor from outside the service. Broadband TV News reported on 16 February 2024 that Setanta Sports had renewed its Bundesliga rights across ten Eurasian markets, naming Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, running to the 2028/29 season, and had separately taken Baltic coverage in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The report quotes Setanta Sports deputy chief executive Bacha Malazonia saying that “Setanta Sports has a long history of cooperation with Bundesliga International”.^[2] Rights arrangements change on re-tender and this one is dated to that report.

How large is Setanta Sports's audience?

No audited audience figure for the service in Georgia could be retrieved. The recognised currency for Georgian television audiences is TV MR Ge, whose figures are the ones the European Journalism Centre's Media Landscapes report cites for channel share; that report's published shares are for 2017 and name Imedi TV, Rustavi 2, GDS, a comedy channel and the public broadcaster's first channel, and do not carry a subscription sport service.^[5]

The service publishes no subscriber number on the pages read for this page.^[1] The Georgian traffic counter TOP.GE does not carry setantasports.com among the twenty entries in its sport category, and in any case states that its sport-category statistics are generated from the previous day, which is a single day's reading and not a period average.^[6]

Since when has Setanta Sports existed?

The Georgian site gives no launch date for the service in Georgia and no founding date for the company.^[1] No founding or launch date for the Georgian operation could be retrieved for this page from the operator or from a regulator.

What is dated is the relationship the service describes with one rights holder. Broadband TV News reported on 16 February 2024 that the Bundesliga renewal continued an existing partnership, and quoted the Bundesliga International chief marketing officer, Peer Naubert, describing the partnership as “already well-established”. That establishes the arrangement as running before February 2024; it does not date the service's founding.^[2]

The publisher named on the related Georgian sports title, Setanta Sports Media LLC, is described there as publishing that title with a local newsroom under a trademark licence from RCS Mediagroup SpA; that about page gives no date either.^[3]

Why does Setanta Sports matter in Georgia's sport?

It is the outlet on this list whose place rests on carriage rather than on publishing: the Bundesliga renewal reported on 16 February 2024 names Georgia among the territories covered to the 2028/29 season.^[2] It is also the named publisher of a separate Georgian-language sports title, La Gazzetta dello Sport Georgia.^[3]

Published monitoring of the market it operates in is reported here in the monitor's own words. Reporters Without Borders placed Georgia 135th of 180 countries in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index with a score of 40.77, and writes under its media-landscape heading that “the media landscape is diverse and, at the same time, highly politically polarised”.^[7] The same profile records that the advertising market is underdeveloped and declining across print and online.^[7] Nothing in that profile is addressed to this service.