LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - Facebook has signed an exclusive deal to broadcast every La Liga game for the next three seasons to eight countries in the Indian subcontinent.
Football fans from India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, The Maldives, Sri Lanka and Pakistan will now have to stream the Spanish football league through the social media platform if they want to watch it for free.

The rights were previously held by Sony Pictures Network and the last time they were for sale in 2014 they were bought for $32m. The details of the deal with Facebook are still unclear.

"We had to renew the agreement and one of the firms that bet the strongest was Facebook, which joined the traditional operators. This move is great news since it grants Asian fans of La Liga the possibility to get closer to the sport. In the Indian subcontinent the social network has almost 350m users, many of them interested in football," Alfredo Bermejo, director of digital strategy at La Liga tells Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

Peter Hutton, Facebook's director of Global Live Sports, said the deal with La Liga as an experiment and he ruled out an immediate land grab of rights deals in sport.

"Were looking at a few other deals that are quite close to completion but this is not about going out and buying a huge amount of content worldwide," he told Reuters.

Live sport is the major driver of subscriptions to premium cable or satellite services and since the rise of Netflix and other online platforms, live sport has been the only asset that cable and satellite can use to stay in the game.

In the UK, the current Premier League season will be the last time every live match will be shown on a TV channel. Next season 20 games will be viewable via Amazon for which fans will have to have a Prime subscription to watch it.

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