Serie A football matches, Champions League matches, plus other major sporting events on TV. All with a single subscription of around 20 euros per month, 250 euros per year. Not much, compared to the high prices of football on TV with Dazn. Even with commentary in Italian. Possible? Yes, with Tring, a platform that some have called “the (almost) legal Albanian piece”.
Rights purchased legally for Albania
Tring is an Albanian television group founded in 2004 and has also become a streaming platform over the years. Tring legally purchases the television rights for the Albanian market, but its service would also be accessible outside the country, calling into question the exclusivity of broadcasters who have bought the same rights for other territories. Precisely for this reason, according to what Il Fatto Quotidiano reports, the first letters of complaint from Serie A began at the end of last season.
In recent months, Tring has entered into a commercial agreement with its historic rival DigitAlb: the two platforms have unified the offer, effectively concentrating a large part of the sports rights available in Albania. Basically, with a Tring subscription you can access many sporting events, including Serie A, Champions League, Bundesliga, NBA and MotoGP. The price, as Il Fatto Quotidiano recalls in an article by Lorenzo Vendemiale, has nevertheless doubled compared to last season, but remains particularly attractive for sports lovers, given the prices of Italian season tickets to follow the same events on TV.
Tring is also seen in Italy
One thing needs to be clarified. The Tring platform is perfectly legal in Albania, because it bought the television rights there. The problem is when it spreads them outside Albanian borders, including Italy: this type of contract usually imposes geolocalization constraints on the content. Tring, however, would have explained that the failure to block is done to allow Albanian citizens residing abroad to also be reached. In the meantime, this streaming service has also been discovered by several Italian fans, so much so that last year the matches also had commentary in Italian.
In short: even if the rights are sold for individual countries, the Internet makes it more complicated to prevent a subscription purchased in one country from being used in another. We therefore try to take action. Lega Serie A has already contested the situation on the Albanian platform and is trying to resolve the problem before the start of the new football championship. Among the hypotheses there would also be that of interrupting the distribution of the signal in Albania, a solution which however would have a side effect: Tring is still a partner of Serie A and pays around 4 million euros a year for the championship rights.
The matter also concerns the Champions League, whose rights for Italy are held by Sky, and for this reason UEFA would also have been involved. To broadcast football in Italy, broadcasters invest hundreds of millions of euros every year. The overall value of football television rights reaches around 900 million euros per season, with around 700 million paid by Dazn for Serie A.