This year’s European Championships will be different not just because England and Bulgaria failed to qualify for the final stage, but in the way Uefa decided to award the broadcasting rights.

Until now, Uefa has always worked with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which has benefited mainly public broadcasters in each country such as Bulgarian National Television (BNT). The idea was for SportFive to approach each market individually and have a competition for the TV rights. One of the changes was that only one broadcaster was going to have the rights, rather than take its games from the EBU. Uefa has said that viewers would always watch their own country on free-to-air TV.

In Bulgaria this has resulted in BNT losing the rights for the Euro to private Diema Vision.

All 31 matches will be shown live on both of the company’s free-to-air channels Diema and Diema 2. This will be complemented by additional programmes on all three channels, including match repeats and daily highlights. Fans can watch it if they have cable TV or they can watch the 31 games live online on the specially launched website, http://ep2008.ontheweb.bg which has an English version. The benefit for fans is that they can watch all the games live, because Diema Vision has four channels, unlike BNT, which used to use just one TV channel, leading to at least three of the games being shown after the fact.

Bulgarian-language daily Dnevnik has also set up a special website to cover the championship. The address is http://dnevnik.bg/euro2008. Other than that, Eurosport will also broadcast the games from the Euro 2008. Eurosport 2 will show all the news conferences held by the teams.