Setanta Sports plans to recommence taking new subscriptions after it received a takeover offer for the company.
The offer is conditional and based on an examination of the broadcaster’s accounts.
That process is expected to be completed quickly.
The offer for Setanta is from Access Industries, which is owned by US investor Len Blavatnik. Access is already a minority shareholder in Setanta.
The deal is believed to be worth £20m, which will give Access a controlling 51% stake in Setanta.
Setanta currently holds the rights to show two English Premier League packages, or 46 live matches a season, but it lost out in the auction for the next three-year deal to BSkyB and will in future show only 23 games per season against BSkyB's 115.
The failure to win the rights prompted Setanta to conduct a review of its business and attempt to renegotiate rights payments with a range of sporting bodies.
It missed a £3m payment to the Scottish Premier League last week and faces a more than £30m payment to the English Premier League.
Setanta's board has been engaged in emergency refinancing talks all week and has suspended signing up new subscribers. It hit trouble after signing sports rights but failing to sign the number of subscribers it needed to cover the cost.
The Walt Disney-owned sports network ESPN said on Thursday it had no current plan to buy Setanta and the Irish group also failed to reach a wholesale deal with rival broadcaster BSkyB.
Newry firm awaits Setanta news
Newry-based call centre Teleperformance is anxiously waiting to see if efforts to secure the future of Setanta Sports will be successful.
The firm lost the contract to handle enquiries from M50 toll users earlier this week.
French-owned Teleperformance has two large call centres in Newry and Bangor, employing around 700 people.
On Wednesday, it learned that it had lost its contract with BetEireFlow to handle customer enquiries from M50 toll users, due to the high volume of complaints about the service.
However, a spokesperson for the company said that the call centre in Newry had many other contracts and that BetEireFlow was one of its smaller clients.
In a statement, the company's CEO Jeff Smith said: 'Teleperformance is still working through the implications of this news and still assessing the options available to us, and the impact to our Newry site.
'Teleperformance is a growing business and as one of the UK's largest contact centre outsourcers we run many other campaigns for clients and therefore have a number of opportunities that we are working on that we believe will minimise the impact of this.'
Among the company's larger clients are Sainburys and Setanta Sports, both of which are understood to have substantial contracts with the call-centre in Newry.
Efforts are ongoing to save the troubled Irish-based sports broadcaster Setanta from going into administration.
