August 2014. After nine months of blackouts, Sportitalia, the very renowned Italian sports channel television, is born again to broadcast.
To be precise, of the three original channels just one has very recently started on digital terrestrial networks and soon it will also be included within the bouquet of satellite pay tv SKY Italy, where it had already been broadcast in the past, on channel 225.
The programming includes 24 hours of interests for football, with great attention to the spoken dimension and examining closely the negotiations of purchase of the players market and a rich set of more general programs, based on hockey, basketball volleyball and American football.
The programs amount to more than 16 hours of daily of live transmissions and the founder is the same as per the first version, entrepreneur Tarak Ben Ammar, this time joined by a partner, a well known sports journalist, Michele Criscitiello, today elected as a director of the network.
The editorial project involves an investment of 8.6 million euros and it is backed by the Micri Communication Network and Europe.
Micri Communication follows the development of the editorial content transmitted from the network, it also manages sports rights and advertising revenues.
50 people are working in the newsroom among journalists and technicians, about 40 derived from the previous version of SportItalia, with an average age over thirty years, and about half of the staff are women.
The production studies where the programs are made and broadcast are physically collected in three locations (rented for two years) at Unica Video in Milan, but also at an facility in Rome and one in Naples.
About 70 percent of the transmissions is on football and a lot of effort has been made to try to cooperate with the football federations.
Sportitalia channel starts also with a strong vocation in all respects all new media: it involves a comprehensive website which is constantly updated and requesting the public to interact as much as possible.
A special app, called "Si", allows for greater interaction between the public and then the involvement of the audience continues by other means such as social networking, live streaming and VideoOnDemand.
An appropriate online store deals with e-commerce, selling Sportitalia branded clothing.
In addition to football the programs in practice deal with all Italian sports and also take a view on the USA with the NBS, NFL and NHL Basketball; all of this in collaboration with the editors of Tuttomercatoweb and Radio Sportiva.
New also is the point of view regarding advertising, in fact, the network director Criscitiello stated during Sportitalia launch press conference that "the channel wants to build a stable relationship with companies in order for them to become partner sponsors to generate on purpose communication projects designed and made to size, tailored according to the customers' needs."
The basic idea is to have many direct sponsors as a starting point and only later to involve advertising agencies and media centers.
The programs start at six in the morning with the news and sports bulletin and at 7 "SportItalia mattina in charge of the press coverage and American sports stories.
Then from 9 to 11am a program is aired in tandem with Radio Sportiva followed by "A tu per tu" with an long interview in detail, of no less than 30 minutes, to a famous sports protagonist.
Then "Calciomercato" and at 13h "Sportitalia News" is aired, as a long lasting sports news bulletin of two hours.
The afternoon is filled with programs that involve basketball and volleyball with "The magazine" and at 17h football is on again with "Calciomercato Live" followed in the early evening with "Aspettando Calciomercato" and then with "Speciale Calciomercato" an historical transmission of the channel in the previous version. The television day programming ends at midnight with the last sports bulletin, TG sports.
