Wednesday, 21st November 2007

SPORTS SHORTS

* The Chinese city of Hangzhou is to stage the first major new women’s squash tournament of the 2008 season. The Women’s International Squash Players’ Association has announced that the tournament will be a WISPA Premiere Series event, meaning that the promoters will receive special advice and financial support from the governing body. The WISPA Hangzhou Open will take place at the squash hall of the Hangzhou Gymnasium from January 23 to 25 and offer $10,900 in prize money. The WISPA Premiere Series concept was launched at the recent Icelandair Group Classic in Reykjavik. Source: Sportcal, 20th Nov 2007

* ESPN, Nimbus and Sony have all expressed interest in acquiring the rights for Indian cricket’s Twenty20 Indian Premier League. The three broadcasters made presentations to the Board of Control for Cricket in India on their marketing plans ahead of the formal tender process which is expected to start at the end of the month. The winning bid is likely to be announced in the first week in December. Source: Sport Business, Sportcal, 20th Nov 2007

* Meanwhile, the backers of the Indian Cricket League, organisers of the unofficial Twenty20 competition in the north of the country, have claimed that the Board of Control for Cricket in India is still threatening players and stadium owners not to co-operate with the new venture. The BCCI has said it will ban players involved with the ICL, which is supported by Essel Group, the owner of media group Zee Telefilms, and take action against grounds which stage matches. However, ICL chief executive Ashish Kaul says it can operate perfectly well outside the auspices of the board, saying: ‘The BCCI itself is a private organisation. So are we. ICL is as recognised or unrecognised as the BCCI. We don’t need any recognition or money from the BCCI.’ Source: Sportcal, 20th Nov 2007

* The value of sport to television is set to increase as statistics show that its live nature means viewers are less likely to use digital video recorders to skip ad breaks. The Financial Times quotes US research by MediaVest showing that, in the last week of October, 25% of viewers watched Grey’s Anatomy on time shift, giving them opportunity to skip ads. In contrast fewer than 2% did so for sporting events. Sport is partly credited for enabling CBS, the US television network, to post double-digit increases in advertising revenues this year. Meanwhile, with two months to go until the NFL Super Bowl, rivals Fox have sold all but two advertising slots at prices as high as $2.7 million for 30-seconds of airtime. Source: Sportcal, 20th Nov 2007

* Sixteen-time Turkish champion Galatasaray SK has become the latest club to be added to the Superleague Formula grid ahead of its debut in August 2008. Galatasaray will take its place on a 20-strong grid in the new championship featuring 750 horsepower, V12-powered single seaters bearing colours of the world’s leading clubs. Launched in April this year, the championship will kick off in 2008 with an initial six races staged at major circuits across Europe. Three major club launches are scheduled for Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), RSC Anderlecht in Brussels (Belgium) and FC Basel (Switzerland) in the next three weeks. Additional club signings are set to be announced early in 2008. Source: Football Insider, 20th Nov 2007

* FC Barcelona has made further strides to reach out to its huge global fan base by becoming the first European football club to offer its official website in Arabic. The Primera División giant has also launched a Korean language version of FCBarcelona.com, ensuring that the site can now be accessed in seven different languages. “Having the website in seven languages is a remarkable feat and pioneering in the world of football,” said Marc Ingla, Barcelona’s vice-president of marketing and media. The launch is the result of an agreement with LinkDotNet, which was officially unveiled during Barcelona’s trip to the Egyptian city of Cairo for a friendly on April 24. Source: Sports Media, 20th Nov 2007

* A1 GP World Cup of Motorsport’s Team Malaysia agreed a deal with Sime Darby Berhad as a new sponsor of the team for this weekend’s home event at the Sepang International Circuit in Kuala Lumpur. The Sime Darby group is a leading Malaysian multinational and one of Southeast Asia's largest conglomerates. Under the deal, Sime Darby branding and logos will be shown on the A1 Team Malaysia car and driver suits. Source: Sport Business, 20th Nov 2007


MORE NEWS

Japan/New Media: LIVESPORTS.JP Announces Launch of Sports Streaming Portal

LIVESPORTS, the new LIVE sports streaming portal site, announced today that it has launched its activity with the most prestigious sports content for the Japanese market. Content will include SERIE A (Italian Soccer League) with both LIVE and Video-On-Demand content, as well as CELTIC GLASGOW (Scottish Premier League Team where Shunsuke Nakamura plays) and, all of the matches of the ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE on a VOD basis.

LIVESPORTS will allow Japanese viewers to watch international and Japanese sporting events, and will stream a wide range of sports including motor sports, winter sports and even extreme sports content.

Broadband penetration in Japan is amongst the best in the world, with over 27 million homes already wired and continuing to grow. LIVESPORTS combines the simplicity, immediacy and visual quality of traditional television with interactivity, flexibility, and far reach of broadband internet usage. Consumers have access to a potentially unlimited range of top tier sports action programs, being accessible wherever and whenever they wish to view it.

LIVESPORTS’s innovative distribution technology combines both peer-to-peer (P2P) and CDN (Content Distribution Network) capabilities enabling high resolution (1-1.5M bps) and immersive content to be distributed nationwide, to anyone with a broadband internet connection across Japan.

LIVESPORTS enables all the sports fans’ dreams to come true. They can watch premium, highly-valued LIVE sports action at television-quality definition, wherever and whenever consumers have a broadband internet connection. In Japan, this means almost everywhere,” said Andrea Radrizzani, CEO LIVESPORTS Pte. “This will also be the first time that top-class European football is available LIVE and on-demand to the public in Japan through the internet.” Source: Sports e-Media, Sportcal, 20th Nov 2007

Elsewhere/Rights: Sky Italia Makes Offer to End Serie B TV Dispute

Sky Italia, the Italian pay-television broadcaster, has made a proposal to Italian’s soccer second-tier Serie B aimed at ending a lengthy dispute over coverage of the league. The 20 Serie B clubs received an offer yesterday from Sky Italia for the rights to all games. There is no fee involved, with the clubs instead receiving 95% of the money generated by Sky Italia from selling the games on a pay-per-view basis for €5 ($7.39) each. Without a television deal in place, Serie B clubs’ combined debts have been estimated at around €150 million.

In October, the clubs protested at the lack of live television coverage by deciding to prevent crews from entering their stadiums. The clubs also voiced their discontent about the high rights fees being paid to Serie A clubs and the amount that Rai, the Italian public service broadcaster, is spending on international soccer.

Rai and Sky Italia had both failed to meet the asking price set for Serie B rights. Rai had sought to fund a bid for the rights by sublicensing Euro 2008 rights for selected matches to Sky Italia, if Italy qualified for the international tournament. Serie B clubs have recently threatened to halt the league following new proposals for distributing future Serie A rights, which would net the top division €795 million a season, around eight times the €105 million on offer to Serie B. Source: Sportcal, 20th Nov 2007

Elsewhere/New Media: ITTF Still Searching for the Right Internet Strategy

The International Table Tennis Federation has handed ZIM, the internet television broadcaster, an ultimatum to produce satisfactory internet coverage of the Pro Tour Grand Finals in Beijing on December 13 to 16, or lose the contract. ZIM was appointed at the beginning of the year by the ITTF and TMS International, its marketing arm, to offer live and archived coverage of the Pro Tour and World Junior Tour series, but is yet to convince the federation of the reliability of its coverage, according to Jordi Serra, the ITTF’s executive director. Serra told Sportcal.com: ‘The Grand Finals in Beijing will be the last chance for ZIM to show us what they can do.’

He said that the ITTF was still undertaking a ‘trial period’ for internet coverage and looking at what different companies can offer, as it ‘needs to be sure which technologies are reliable and be clear as to what the live production costs are for internet coverage.’ Christian Veronese, event marketing manager of TMS International, said: ‘We are still trying to give a chance to three different companies including ZIM, to webcast the ITTF events. ZIM will have the exclusive rights for live webcast at the next Grand Finals in Beijing.’ The other two internet service providers are the German companies Contenthouse and TTLive.

Serra described the internet as an ‘important new communication tool for sports like us and the ITTF must be there,’ adding that, ‘we are not making money from it but we are not spending much money either.’ He said, ‘At the beginning there were [internet] companies offering lots of money to international federations, but now the money is not so big and organisations are going bankrupt.’ The ITTF official website last week began broadcasting replays of games in full, although there have been some problems synchronizing the sound with the pictures. ZIM and the ITTF had originally planned to offer free live and replay coverage of competitions in 2007 and then introduce a subscription model from 2008. Source: Sportcal, 20th Nov 2007