Tuesday, 20th November 2007

SPORTS SHORTS

* CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster, has attracted Yn80 billion ($10.7 billion) in an auction of its advertising slots for next year, with 30 per cent more companies bidding for slots as a result of next year's Olympic Games. The figure represents a 20% on this year's advertising slots auction, with peak-time slots during the games in August the most popular. Source: Sportcal, 19th Nov 2007

* Golf’s European Tour is to stage the game’s richest ever tournament worth $20 million in Dubai in 2009. According to UK media reports the event will have a total prize pot of $10 million, with a further $10 million to be divided as bonus money among the highest-ranked players at the end of the 2009 season. Further details will be announced in Dubai later this month. The tournament will be backed by the government of Dubai as part of its wider plans to establish itself as the world's premier tourist destination. Source: Sport Business, Sportcal, 19th Nov 2007

* Red Bee Media, formerly BBC Broadcast, has opened an office in Singapore. The office opening follows establishing branches in France, China and Australia. Red Bee has worked with broadcasters in the Asia region, including i-Cable Hong Kong, ATV, Jupiter Entertainment, INX Media, ESPN and STAR. The new operation in Singapore will be working on interactive design, media management, branding, promotional and editorial service projects. Running the Singapore office will be Petri Nikula, vice president of business development. Nikula has worked in media and marketing for 12 years with Microsoft, VoiceAge Networks and Nokia, in the Americas and Europe, as well as Asia. Source: Rapid TV News, 19th Nov 2007

* GigaMedia Limited has secured an exclusive licence from Electronic Arts (EA) - a leading developer and publisher of interactive entertainment - to offer and operate the new sports game NBA Street Online in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. NBA Street Online is a new version of EA's popular NBA games series, which features some of the world’s top basketball stars. “Sports games are a huge, untapped market in Asia, and EA is a sports superstar,” said GigaMedia CEO Arthur Wang. EA Asia president Jon Niermann added: “Basketball is the No.1 sport in Taiwan and we are confident of continued great success in the sport with NBA Street Online.” Source: Sports Media, 19th Nov 2007

* The French football league, the LFP, is expected to launch its TV rights tender in the first week of December, with a deal likely to be agreed in January or February. The league is awaiting final permission to sell its rights for a four-year term from the French competition authority. The LFP sought to have its contracts extended from three to four years, with 12 packages. Source: Sport Business, 19th Nov 2007

* IMG has been told by the International Olympic Committee that it is no longer eligible to act as an adviser to Olympic bid cities, because of concerns over possible conflicts of interest. The IOC’s ethics commission has ruled that IMG’s existing role as a consultant to the IOC on other issues, including television rights, gives the agency privileged access to IOC members which they could use to lobby the members on behalf of a bid city. While there is no suggestion that access has been abused in this way, it is understood that the IOC wants to rule out such a possibility. The IOC has received no complaints on IMG, raising the question as to why it has decided to take such a step. One possibility, according to one observer, is that the agency might be about to be handed a far greater role in advising the IOC on other issues. Source: Sportcal, 19th Nov 2007

* Pan-European motor sports channel, Motors TV, is expanding its coverage of Australia’s V8 Supercars after signing a new three-year deal to televise the series. In the new agreement, which runs until 2010, Motors TV will show races on a live and delayed basis, while offering more coverage of qualifying at certain rounds. Motors TV will broadcast races in five different languages to 15 million homes in 36 countries. V8 Supercars Australia chairman Tony Cochrane said: ‘We are very proud of our international television audience and Motors TV is an integral part of it within the European market. This helps maintain our international television footprint of 850 million homes worldwide that broadcast our sport.’ Source: Sportcal, 19th Nov 2997

* Flamengo has announced the launch of its online TV station in two weeks’ time. The Brazilian giant is expecting to attract around 500,000 subscribers, with FlaTV featuring player interviews, footage from behind the scenes at the club, and live coverage of training sessions. Club vice-president, Kleber Leite, is optimistic about the new revenue streams the channel can potentially open up. “We look to collect R5 million (US$2.85 million) from the service (in the first year). 75% of that amount will be reinvested in the clubs, with another 15% going towards player costs. Computers are selling at twice the rate of televisions in Brazil and who knows, we might even have one million subscribers soon.” Source: Football Insider, 19th Nov 2007

* The www.uefa.com website is offering live coverage of 14 of the 16 games at the ongoing UEFA European Futsal Championship in Portugal. Spain, Portugal, Russia, Italy, Ukraine, Serbia, Czech Republic and Romania are participating at the event. There is also TV coverage of the competition from Eurosport and other UEFA broadcast partners. Live streaming is available on a free-to-view basis in some territories, including Asia. Full subscribers to uefa.com's premium video service (uefa.com/video) are also able to access extensive delayed coverage including in-match event clips, full match re-runs and 10-minute highlights from every game. Source: Sports Media, 19th Nov 2007

* ITV has sold to Manchester United its one-third share in the club's television channel, MUTV, for £3.3 million. Tom Betts, commercial and acquisitions director at Britain’s largest free-to-air broadcaster, said the move represented “ITV's ongoing non-core asset disposal programme”. The Barclays Premier League champion now owns two-thirds of MUTV. Satellite pay-TV company BSkyB owns the other third. Earlier this year, ITV offloaded its stakes in United’s English rivals Arsenal and Liverpool for a combined total of around £82 million. Source: Sports Media, Sport Business, Sportcal, 19th Nov 2007

* Athens, Bangkok, Moscow, Singapore and Turin were selected by the International Olympic Committee as the candidate cities to host the first Youth Olympic Games in 2010. Excluded from the shortlist were Debrecen, Guatemala City, Kuala Lumpur and Poznan. A further cut could take place in late January next year before IOC members decide which city will stage the games through a postal vote in February, 2008. The selection this time round was made on the basis of the cities’ candidature files submitted to the IOC last month. An evaluation commission visit to the cities will follow. Source: Sportcal, 19th Nov 2007


MORE NEWS

Elsewhere/Rights: DFL Undersold Bundesliga Rights to Kirch, Says Sportfive

The German Football League is guilty of underselling its broadcast rights to Leo Kirch, the reborn media entrepreneur, according to Thomas Röttgermann, managing director of the German arm of international sports marketing giant Sportfive. Röttgermann criticised the DFL’s six-year, €3-billion ($4.4-billion) deal with Kirch for the production and domestic distribution rights of the top-tier Bundesliga, claiming that the league could have generated more income.

He told Germany’s Die Welt newspaper, ‘If you ask me, I think that the Bundesliga rights are worth more. ‘If I had been in the shoes of the DFL’s chief executive Christian Seifert, I would have been gutsier. ‘Leo Kirch also appears to consider the rights to be worth more, or else he wouldn’t have done the deal.’

Röttgermann, who also said that Sportfive ‘would love to market the Bundesliga rights,’ claimed to be surprised that the league opted to hand the distribution rights to Kirch without a tender. He said: ‘You should not forget that Kirch plunged the league into an existence-threatening crisis, for which a solution would scarcely have been found without the help of politicians.’

The collapse in 2002 of Kirch’s media group KirchMedia, which held the Bundesliga rights at the time, was the most spectacular in German broadcasting history and left clubs facing large debts. Sirius, the production and distribution partnership set up by the DFL and Kirch, is to begin marketing the domestic rights from 2009-10 onwards at the beginning of next year. Kirch’s €500-million-a-year deal with the DFL represents a rise of around €80 million a year on the value of the domestic rights. Source: Sportcal, 19th Nov 2007

Elsewhere/General: Garber Hails Beckham Impact On Viewing Figures

Major League Soccer (MLS) commissioner Dan Garber insists David Beckham has had a major impact on television ratings in 2007. Beckham, who switched to the Los Angeles Galaxy franchise earlier this year, has only played five matches in MLS because of a series of injuries. However, Garber is happy with the England player’s contribution so far.

“The Chicago Fire versus LA Galaxy game - the last one of the regular season - which was aired by Telefutura, had 400,000 households watching that game,” said Garber in the New York Times. “That is three times the typical Telefutura rating for an MLS game. We did similar numbers for ESPN games when David was in the conversation. Our ratings on ESPN and Telefutura have nearly doubled when David is playing in a game.” International television sales have also been boosted by Beckham’s arrival, Garber added. “International TV sales have gone up from next to nothing to distribution in 100 countries, with live games in Asia and Mexico. Our fan following in England, Italy, Spain, Mexico and Canada has grown exponentially.”

Garber added: “Every measure of our business has grown because of him, from our gate to our merchandise to our television sponsors and corporate sponsors. We have sold more than 300,000 Beckham Galaxy jerseys - 700 times the number of Galaxy jersey sold in 2007. A player who is a global icon in sports made a statement to spend the rest of his career in MLS. The statement alone has given us credibility.” Source: Sports Media, 19th Nov 2007