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We invited the good and the great to the Blackstaff studio this week to offically launch the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s media commitment to the NW200 for this year.....and beyond.

´óÏó´«Ã½ Sport Northern Ireland has signed a new deal to continue broadcasting the North-West 200 International road races, one of the most famous and prestigious motorsport events in the world. The deal - for the next five years - runs from 2010 to 2014.

Coverage of the NW 200 festival on TV will include preview and highlights programmes, live reports from the circuit each night on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Newsline and enhanced onboard and road-side footage.

´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Ulster will continue to have live coverage of the main race with features, build-up and live reports on everything happening during the festival on a number of programmes throughout the week.

Shane Glynn, Editor of Sport says: "When we secured the rights to the North West 200, we pledged to provide fans with the most innovative, creative and in depth coverage of the races and the week leading up to them. I hope we've delivered on that promise. Our partnership with Mervyn Whyte and his team is very strong, and we're looking forward to working together at the North West until 2014, and hopefully beyond.

The profile of the North West has risen tremendously, and we're delighted to be involved in what has established itself as one of Ireland's top sporting events. We will be working hard with Mervyn to see how we can further improve and develop our coverage."

Mervyn Whyte MBE, Clerk of Course says: We are completely delighted that we have been able to secure a further five years with ´óÏó´«Ã½ Northern Ireland. We have achieved so much over the past three years together and to be able to continue this relationship is the icing on the cake for the competition.

The coverage across TV, Radio and online has been second to none and the NW200 are excited about the relationship going from strength to strength in the next five years."

As the NW200 begins to loom on the horizon theÌý´óÏó´«Ã½ NI Sport team add a few props to highlight this year's 80th Anniversary of the event. Stephen Watson, below right, has been likened to the character who terrorised our music charts a few years ago, after this snap was published !

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The NW200 blog will feature all the latest news and views as the days and weeks pass untill race week, May 11 - 16 2009.

We will have Adrian Coates and Phillip McCallen back again to give their inside knowledge on the riders and paddock gossip. Stephen Watson will tell us what it's like having to work on the event when he'd rather be a bike fan sitting on Juniper Hill. Plus a few guest bloggers will dop in during race week to add their comments.

We can now embed Flash video into our blogs. The one below shows the contrast between the bikes and course of the flat cap years to the fast and furious machines of the 21st century.

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We will be making the most of social networking tools, working hard for you behind the scenes on the world wide web. We then force their results into a special widget which spits out all things NW200 to our site.

Sites like Flickr, Twitter and various Blogs all host wonderful content about the NW200, past and present which, when tagged with "NW200" will show up on our feed.

We have also been busy re-designing our homepage to give instant access to the best videos in a grid friendly style - coming soon.........

So Blog, Twitter and Flickr your heart out and you might find your content winding up here on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ NW200 site, soon...