Monday, 3rd September 2007

HEADLINE NEWS

Hyderabad Blasts Bleed Organisers of India Open

The postponement of the Yonex Sunrise India Open, which would have showcased some of the finest talent in the badminton world, has meant that around Rs.2.5 million and three months of hard work has gone down the drain. The event has been postponed to January following the twin blasts in the city. Several stake holders, including sponsors Yonex, event management company NEB, and officials of the Andhra Pradesh Badminton Association, have lost money. The US $150,000 tournament was to be held from Sep 5 to 9 at the Kotla Vijayabhaskar Reddy Stadium.

'It's all over,' said a disheartened Punnaiah Choudary, organising secretary of the event, part of the team that has been working for the tournament since June. 'We don't know the extent of the loss yet, but it is around Rs.25 lakh (Rs.2.5 million). We have called for a meeting tomorrow to decide the next course of action.' The event would have been the most high profile Open tournament ever held in India. With several world champions - including 2007 title-holder Zhu Lin (women's singles), Zhang Jiewen and Yang Wei (women's doubles) and 2005 winner Taufik Hidayat - having confirmed, the tournament was expected to revive badminton's media space in the country.

Event management company NEB, based in Bangalore, and sports equipment manufacturer Yonex have spent around Rs.1 million. Office-bearers of the Andhra Pradesh Badminton Association, including Punnaiah Choudary, Ramachandra Rao and Phani Rao, have spent around Rs.50,000 each. Most of the money so far has been spent on publicity material, press events and international travel for officials connected with the event. A press meet in Mumbai was held on June 7 to announce the event, and it cost Rs.400,000. Another press meet, where the mascot was unveiled by R. Damodar Reddy, minister for sports and Information Technology on Saturday, cost Rs.200,000.

Pullela Gopichand, who had worked hard to get the event to Hyderabad, said the event hadn't been insured yet. A press statement from the Badminton World Federation said that Badminton Association of India president V.K. Verma had informed them of the postponement after consulting the government and sponsors.

The Badminton Association of Malaysia was the first to voice its fears over player safety, following which the Malaysian government refused to clear the team. Curiously, there have been no enquiries from China, although they had cleared an 18-member team for the event. The twin bombings in the city on Saturday killed 43 people and injured 70. Source: Monsters & Critics IND, 28th Aug 2007

Meanwhile, The Star (Malaysia) quotes a Reuters report: The Indian Open in Hyderabad has been postponed due to security concerns after bombs killed 40 people in the city. National coach Pullela Gopichand said yesterday that the championship scheduled for Sept 4-7 had been tentatively fixed for the second week of January. He added that the decision was taken after discussions with Badminton World Federation deputy president Punch Gunalan.


RESULTS

U.S. Open 2007 – Day 7

Men’s Singles Results Highlights
Rafael Nadal def. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga FRA 7-6 (7-3) 6-2 6-1
Juan Ignacio Chela ARG (20) def. Ivan Ljubicic CRO (12) 6-4 6-7 (5-7) 2-6 6-3 6-3

Women’s Singles Results Highlights
Justine Henin BEL (1) def. Dinara Safina (15) 6-0 6-2
Serena Williams USA def. Marion Bartoli FRA 6-3 6-4
Venus Williams USA (12) def. Ana Ivanovic SRB (5) 6-4 6-2

Women’s Doubles Results Highlights
Katarina Srebotnik SLO (3) Ai Sugiyama JPN (3) def. Vania King USA (15) Emilie Loit FRA (15) 6-3 6-2
Yung-Jan Chan TPE (5) Chia-Jung Chuang TPE (5) def. Anabel Medina Garrigues ESP (9) Virginia Ruano Pascual ESP (9) 6-4 6-2


OTHER WEEKEND EVENTS

Sports Features, 3rd Sep 2007
The top seeded team of Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser secured their ninth AVP title of the season defeating Aaron Wachtfogel and Scott Wong at the AVP Cincinnati Open, both making their finals debut, 23-21, 24-22. Rogers and Dalhausser have nine domestic titles this year which is the most for any team since Jose Loiola and Kent Steffes had 12 in 1997. With the victory, Dalhausser captured his 20th career title with Rogers notching his 32nd win. Wachtfogel and Wong are two of three players to make their debut in the finals this year. Rogers and Dalhausser uncharacteristically had to fight back through the contenders bracket to make it to the finals after dropping a match to fifth seeded John Hyden and Brad Keenan 21-15, 21-13. They then went on to defeat Casey Jennings and Matt Fuerbringer 21-16, 21-17 and defending champions Mike Lambert and Stein Metzger 21-14, 21-18.

AVP Official, 3rd Sep 2007
Off the court, they are congenial ambassadors for the AVP Crocs Tour. On the court, they are relentless warriors with an insatiable thirst for victory. Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh made it 12 titles for the year and put an exclamation point beside their Crocs Cup trophy with Sunday's AVP Cincinnati Open championship. May-Treanor and Walsh took out Barbra Fontana and Dianne DeNecochea, 21-17, 21-15, in the final to end the regular season with a flourish.

Motorsport.com, 3rd Sep 2007
After starting from pole position, Audi driver Martin Tomczyk (Rosenheim) continued setting the pace throughout the 43-lap race to celebrate his second consecutive DTM victory. His team-mate Mattias Ekstrom impressively fought to make up ground from tenth place on the grid to a third-place finish, thus defending his lead in the standings. Timo Scheider in fourth place and Tom Kristensen in eighth completed Audi's triumph in the Eifel, which saw all four 2007-spec Audi A4 DTM cars fielded by Audi Sport Team Abt Sportsline finish in the points.

The Scotsman UK, 3rd Sep 2007
ENGLAND'S Darren Turner racked up two wins in the British Touring Car Championship triple-header at Knockhill, and his Seat team-mate Jason Plato heads to the final round leading the title race, but the happiest man at the Fife circuit was Gordon Shedden. Not only did the 28-year-old from Dalgety Bay - in only his second full season in Britain's premier tintop championship and already a multiple winner - claim his first victory at his home circuit, but he posted the fastest lap in all three races. Shedden, driving his Honda Civic Type-R, led home a Team Halfords 1-2 ahead of team-mate and defending champion Matt Neal in yesterday's final race.


THIS WEEK

Mon to Tue, 3rd to 4th Sep 2007
US Open Tennis Championships 2007: Early Rounds

Wed to Thu, 5th to 6th Sep 2007
US Open Tennis Championships 2007: Quarter-finals

Fri, 7th Sep 2007
US Open Tennis Championships 2007: Women’s Semi-finals

Sat, 8th Sep 2007
US Open Tennis Championships 2007: Men’s Semi-finals
US Open Tennis Championships 2007: Women’s Finals

Sun, 19th Aug 2007
US Open Tennis Championships 2007: Men’s Finals
AVP Crocs Tour 2007: Final Day – Las Vegas Gods & Goddesses
Superbikes World Championship 2007: Race Day – Euro Speedway, Lausitz, Germany
Masters Football: Finals


SPORTS SHORTS

* Asian sports broadcaster ESPN Star Sports has agreed a new 5-year rights deal with the England Cricket Board. It acquired the exclusive right to broadcast ECB’s domestic and home international matches across television (inclusive of mobile TV), internet and radio. Covering the core cricket markets of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, the contract also provides ESS the broadcast rights throughout the Middle East, China, Japan and the rest of Asia. It will broadcast over 200 days of live international cricket action from England including 34 Test matches, 54 one day internationals and nine Twenty20 games. ESS will broadcast ECB’s domestic cricket, including the popular Twenty20 Cup, Provident Trophy, England Lions matches & Pro40 series. Late last year, ESPN Star Sports was awarded the exclusive global telecast rights from the ICC for all of their events from 2007 to 2015 and recently launched a dedicated cricket channel, Star Cricket. Source: Sport Business, Sportcal, Worldscreen, 31st Aug 2007

* India’s telecoms regulator may have given DTH services a huge boost by ordering operators allow subscribers to rent set-top boxes. The Telecoms Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued quality of service regulations requiring the country’s three existing and four prospective DTH operators allow subs to either buy, rent or hire-purchase set-top boxes. TRAI may also “prescribe suitable schemes in this regard in future if necessary”. Current practice is for operators to charge prospective subscribers to buy boxes outright. That makes DTH services less accessible than cable services, which rent equipment out to subscribers. The new regulations also require that operators do not raise the fee for a subscriber’s package for six months after they have subscribed to it. Source: Rapid TV News, 3rd Sep 2007

* Thomson has revealed its new deterrent to piracy utilising watermarking technology allowing video on demand (VoD) operators to identify content on a per transaction basis. The combination of Thomson’s Sapphire VoD server and NexGuards watermarking technology offers an end-to-end content tracking and piracy deterrence solution. Thomson has also revealed that Taiwan’s terrestrial broadcaster, Public Television Service Foundation (PTS), has selected Thomson’s mobile TV solutions for DVB-H pilot trials of Mobile TV. Source: Advanced Television, 30th Aug 2007

* Qualcomm’s TV to mobile system will be trialed in Malaysia using Maxis and sat-operator Astro. MediaFLO’s Malaysian technical trial will carry 25 live channels in an 8MHz UHF stream. Test transmissions will begin shortly. Part of MediaFLO’s system is its Clipcast store and later playing of content, and this element will be included as part of the trial. Qualcomm said that telco Maxis and satellite operator Astro will evaluate the results which could lead to a commercial deployment on the Maxis cellular network “in 2008”. Maxis had already tested rival mobile TV technology DVB-H earlier, in a trial with Hutchison’s mobile operator 3 Italia. Maxis and Astro are waiting on a decision from the Malaysian government on how much spectrum the companies will be awarded for a mobile TV service. The companies now must also decide what technology to use. Source: Rapid TV News, Advanced Television, 3rd Sep 2007

* Hong Kong’s TVB is seeking to make something out of its loss-making TVB Pay Vision pay-TV unit by selling a 20% stake to a strategic investor for HK$140 million. TVB currently owns 49% of the unit, which the new deal will reduce to just 29%. In the six months to the end of June 2007, TVB took $8.8 million as its share of TVB’s losses, down from $11 million for the same period the previous year. Who the investor is is yet to be announced. TVB Pay Vision offers over 40 channels including eight TVB channels. It is transmitted via satellite through existing SMATV and cable networks and via IPTV, on the networks of Hutchison Global and PCCW. Competition in the Hong Kong pay-TV market is fierce, with Hong Kong Cable TV (i-Cable), PCCW’s Now TV, TVB Pay Vision and Hong Kong Broadband Network fighting over a market of 6 million people. Hong Kong Cable TV has 830,000 subscribers, with Now TV on 818,000. Source: Rapid TV News, Variety Asia, 30th Aug 2007

* Dentsu, the Japanese advertising giant and sports marketing firm, is to seek to 'substantially grow its sports marketing arm in Europe' by launching a bigger operation in London. Dentsu has already registered the new company name - Dentsu Sports Europe - and plans to begin operations either next month or the month after. Kiyoshi Nakamura, deputy director of Dentsu's sports business division, is to head up the new company. Dentsu Sports Europe has been set up to strengthen relations with sports federations in Europe, to expand the company's sports marketing services in North America and Europe, attract more non-Japanese clients and deal in broadcasting rights, according to Dentsu. The company is wholly-owned by Dentsu and has been set up with capital of £1 million ($2.01 million). Source: Sportcal, 30th Aug 2007

* A Spanish court has rejected a request by Sogecable and Audiovisual Sport to block media rights agency Mediapro from entering soccer stadia with television cameras, and from broadcasting the league’s matches. The court ruled that until a legal battle over the ownership of Primera Liga rights is resolved, Mediapro would be allowed access to matches and be permitted to broadcast them, according to a Mediapro statement. Sogecable said it has already appealed against the provisional ruling before a superior court. Sogecable filed a €200-million ($273 million) lawsuit against Mediapro on Monday after La Sexta aired the three matches. Mediapro claims that the deal for the league’s domestic broadcasting rights is void because of a continuing feud over the ownership of Audiovisual Sport, the league’s rights holder until the end of the 2008-09 season. The dispute has disrupted the programming of La Liga’s early-season matches and caused chaos with the international broadcasting of the competition. Source: Sportcal, 31st Aug 2007

* Meanwhile, Mediapro fired the latest salvo in the latest battle against fellow Spanish broadcasters Sogecable. Mediapro plans to file a complaint with competition authorities against Sogecable and its branch, Audiovisual Sport (AVS). The two sides agreed to form AVS in July 2006 as part of deal to air football matches. When Mediapro began buying future rights to matches on a club-by-club basis, Sogecable alleged breach of contract and filed a suit, claiming Mediapro owed them money from the AVS deal. Mediapro contends it is owed money, and that the contract does not disallow competition. Source: EUFootball.biz, 31st Aug 2007

* German pay-television broadcaster, Premiere, is ahead of its subscription target for coverage of the German Bundesliga by the end of this month. Recapturing live Bundesliga rights from rival broadcaster Arena in a €100-million ($136.1-million) -a-year sublicensing deal in mid-July, Premiere has exceeded its target of 200,000 subscriptions by the end of August.A total of 242,000 subscriptions that include the broadcaster's Bundesliga package have been sold since the deal was struck with Arena, 54,000 of which were to new customers, with the remainder amending their existing subscriptions. Subscriptions to the Arena channel during the 2006-07 season, the first season of its coverage, reached only just over 500,000 despite low subscription fees. Source: Sportcal, 30th Aug 2007

* Eurosport topped European internet sport content sites as measured by unique viewers according to ComScore. The Marketing magazine reported that Eurosport had more than 6.7 million unique visitors in July compared to 6.5 million and 6.2 million unique users attracted by Yahoo! Sports and BBC Sports respectively. The highest ranked sports site in the US for July was ESPN, with over 18 million unique visitors. Separately, Eurosport has appointed ex-Initiative corporate communications officer Heather Bowler as head of international media relations, based at Eurosport's Paris head office. Source: Sport Business, 31st Aug 2007

* The ATP, the men’s professional tennis association, is considering suspending players from their most successful events if they withdraw from tournaments without good reason, according to BBC Sport. The ATP Tour and event organisers have been trying to find a way of preventing player withdrawals after the present system of fines has been found to be ineffective. The UK’s public-service broadcaster claimed that the risk of losing ranking points as a result of being banned from their favourite would ‘hit players where it hurts.’ Source: Sportcal, 31st Aug 2007

* David Beckham's move to LA Galaxy has doubled the traffic to the official Major League Soccer website, as interest in one of the world's highest paid sportsmen reached unprecedented levels. According to data released by web analyst company comScore, visitor numbers to the official website of MLS rose 117% from July 2006 to July 2007, when Beckham made his debut for MLS side LA Galaxy. In July this year, 1.04m unique users visited the site, its highest figure to date. The website attracted around 230,000 unique users in December 2006, prior to Beckham announcing his intention to move to the US. However, the figure increased to 808,000 the following month when LA Galaxy confirmed it had signed the player. Source: Brand Republic, 30th Aug 2007


MORE NEWS

Asia/General: Korea and China Lead the Way Beyond the Box

Asian and U.S. execs delivered smart presentations about the future of TV at the Broadcasting Worldwide (BCWW) convention in Seoul. But when it came to mobile TV, they were blown away Thursday by the speed of developments in South Korea and China. Suh Young-kil, CEO of TU Media, reported that mobile TV, launched in South Korea less than two years ago, already has more than 7 million subscribers. The free-to-air service using terrestrial transmission (T-DMB) has 6 million users. TU Media, which is backed by SKT, EchoStar and Samsung, has more than 1.2 million paying subscribers for its satellite-based service (S-DMB). He described forecasts of 16 million Korean users by 2010 as "conservative."

Wu Chunlei, CEO of Shanghai Dragon New Media, part of the Shanghai Media Group, said China is adding 65 million mobile subscribers per year. He said there are 2.1 million mobile TV users, including 250,000 paid-for subscriptions, at rates as low as $1.60 a month. "(In China) video is the only killer application for 3G so far," he said.

Mobile TV has quickly become embedded in Korean popular culture. Viewing time now exceeds 65 minutes per day for subscribers, and TV compatibility is a key factor in most people's choice of cell phone handset. Suh reported that Korean manufacturers are selling phones capable of receiving both S-DMB and T-DMB services and that in-car devices are being combined with satellite navigation equipment. After two years, Suh said that TU Media had found that consumers prefer traditional shows and live sports over made-for-mobile content. Primetime viewing hours are very different from those for traditional channels, reflecting commuting times and the role of mobile devices as second TV sets in a household. Hanaro TV's Kim Sung-yong said his company was surprised to learn how many women were watching erotic content mid-evening on their cell phones.

"We would expect China to have different consumption patterns to Korea," Shanghai Dragon's Wu said. Market research indicated that 66% of potential customers wanted to watch news and info shows on a mobile phone, with 50% seeking music and 40% wanting movies. In response Shanghai Dragon has launched its own mobile info channel, with news bought from official sources sliced into 10- to 15-second bites and rolled into five-minute packages.

But he warned of a dearth of other content and skills to develop the market. He described an overkill of "famous brand content" and said that shows that are less well known are difficult to promote. Cyriac Roeding, exec VP for CBS Mobile, said that the network is learning that viewers migrate from platform to platform throughout the day and that TV, Internet and mobile are all components. He underlined the significance of delivery speed and said the company had developed video alerts. Source: Variety Asia, 31st Aug 2007

Elsewhere/Broadcaster: Setanta aims to overtake Sky as the PL top broadcaster

It is indeed one of the most anticipated showdowns in the English Premier League. One has more to offer. The other said it's not as deep, but what it has is better. With the league underway, the rivalry of old-hand Sky Sports versus upstart Setanta has begun. While Sky has seasons of broadcasting Premier League matches behind it – and 92 total matches available this year – Setanta is in its first year of airing Premier League matches, and only has 79 to show.

But Setanta, which also has landed the 2008-2009 FA Cup along with ITV, is claiming it has quality over quantity. "We are showing more of the big teams than Sky," Setanta COO Mark O'Meara told the Financial Times. "We will be showing the top four (Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal) 23 times in the first couple of months, while Sky is showing them just 19 times. This will be very important for fans of the top teams, as seeing their teams play will be their top priority."

Setanta's premium sports content is available to more than 50 million homes worldwide, and it operates more sports channels than any other broadcaster in Ireland and Britain. But they need to find more customers soon. Setanta put out GBP 392 million to become the first broadcaster other than Sky to see the Premier League rights. While that did much for the company's prestige, it does not always pay the bill. Setanta recently signed a deal to launch on the Dish Network in the U.S., airing the Premier League, as well as the Champions League, the Rugby World Cup, the Six Nations and the Heineken European Cup. Source: EUFootball.biz, 31st Aug 2007