Is tennis on Free to air in your country?

[Chicharito]

I see some comments about tennis being difficult to watch in america?

I means the slams mainly and I suppose the tour?

In the UK:

The whole Wimbledon and French Open are currently Free to air on every TV in the country. Wall to wall coverage. Wimbledon coverage is huge with everything being shown.

Australian Open. Currently both finals and one mens SF free to air. Rest of tournament on pay tv (eurosport) but most of that is during the night anyway.

US Open. Pay TV channel (sky sports)

Masters and 500 are on pay tv (sky)

GB Davis cup matches are free to air.

Afternoon matches at the WTF are FTA as is the final.

Currently the Wimbledon finals must be shown FTA by law.

Edit: The French Open could easily move, just don't feel there is that much demand but wouldn't be surprised to see it go to BT. Probably worth the exposure to keep it on FTA.


I think that is a pretty good deal atm. Expecting the tour as a whole to be free to air would be weird, only big time tennis that is hidden from the public at large is the US Open.

 

[Aussie Darcy]

Australia only does Australian Open and Wimbledon on free to air TV

 

[RNadal]

I wish. Brazil does not give a crap about tennis, which is really unfortunate. You've got to pay to watch it on ESPN or Sportv.

Back in the day, when Guga was huge, they would broadcast some of his finals on free TV though.

 

[Lukhas]

Davis Cup and Fed Cup usually are on free air as well as Paris-Berçy. IIRC, Monte-Carlo and the WTF's last matches are on free air. And Roland has afternoon matches on free air. And that's about it.

 

[Supertegwyn]

Australia only does Australian Open and Wimbledon on free to air TV

Don't forget Davis Cup and the Australian swing (Sydney and Brisbane).

 

[beltsman]

"Free"

 

[norcal]

Very little tennis on 'free' tv in the US. Some Wimbledon and Some US Open? Seems like most of the majors are turning to ESPN.

However the Tennis Channel is on a pretty basic DirecTV plan so that's 'free' in the sense you don't have to shell out extra for it.

I can't imagine being a fan of watching tennis in the US and relying on free tv. Sounds like you have it much better in Europe.

 

[Algo]

We didn't even have the ATP on free-to-air in its last years.
We most times don't have the Davis Cup either, since Gonzalez and Massu retired.

So cable it is, and also barely, ESPN sucks in LA.

 

[TommyA8X]

Almost nothing for "free" here. (2nd week of Wimbledon/FO usually, and 2014 USO final obviously ).
However, If you wanna pay (which I do), you can watch practically every possible tournament out there (AO, FO, USO are on Eurosport. Wimbledon and all the other MS1000/500/250 are on 3 other fairly inexpensive channels.)

 

[Zielmann]

Yeah, tennis really gets very little love in the USA. For the over-the-air (free) coverage, it used to be that you could at least catch the big-name matches throughout the four grand slams. Then several years ago now, they stopped showing the first weeks for everything but the US Open (largely because they could show US Open coverage during daytime hours and not interfere with their popular primetime shows in the evenings). Though you could count on at least getting to see the final weekend of all four grand slams.

This year, I've seen it advertised that ESPN (one of the sports networks that requires paid TV service) will be showing coverage for the entire duration of the US Open for the first time. This would actually indicate to me that none of the free networks will even be showing the finals at all.

I'm pretty much left with catching whatever content they stream online (I don't have a TV anyhow).

 

[xan]

Serbia here, pretty much yeah.
Theres one channel which you pay subscription for (kinda mandatory), but yeah, tennis is free.