John de Mol is to sell his Tien TV channel (formerly known as Talpa) to RTL Nederland. The move was announced earlier today on the RTL Nieuws website. However, within a short time the item was removed from the site.
The news follows weeks of speculation about the future of Tien. Both RTL and SBS were named as potential buyers of the channel, whose main asset is the rights to Dutch premiere league football. Some time ago RTL Nederland CEO Fons van Westerloo said a deal was almost closed, but no further news emerged.
A potential scenario is that the channel will be renamed RTL 10 and will continue as a sports channel with other programming distributed over the other three RTL channels (RTL4, RTL5 and RTL7). At the moment RTL5 carries most of the group’s sports coverage.
