According to an article in British newspaper The Daily Mail, Apple is considering throwing its hat into the bidding ring for the rights to broadcast English Premier League soccer games. The deal is open for a new round of bidding before the end of this season in May.

The Premier League is seen as the type of premium content that will help establish Apple TV in the UK and boost iPad sales, while the iTunes subscription service infrastructure is already in place.

Apple will face some huge competition if it is to get its hands on some form of TV rights for these games. Sky, who currently owns most of the rights for live games, had to pay around £1.6 billion ($2.5 billion) for the privilege. Competition is also likely to come in from Google, ESPN and Middle East Network Al Jezeera.

If Apple did manage to secure some of the rights to live EPL games, it would then have to force consumers to buy an Apple TV if they wanted to see the content on their big screen televisions. This does not appear to make a great deal of sense for the consumer unless of course the deal is just to sell the games through iTunes; in a similar way to its TV episodes.

Source: The Daily Mail

Throwing any last remnants of fragile self-consciousness to the four winds, I break out my subpar French and very rusty Italian and Mandarin Chinese (Aiya!) and see if, even under the onslaught of terrible accents, Apple's new iPhone 3G S Voice Control can still do as it's told.

Note: the accent appears to be key. If you say a command in French, you can't pronounce the following name English-style and expect good results (though Chinese seemed much more English name tolerant). However, I tried some (poorly rendered) regional accents at the very end and that didn't seem to be a problem.

If you're multilingual, or have a colorful twang to your speech, give it a try and let us know how Voice Control works for you!