Friday, 11th February 2011

RIGHTS FEE & DISTRIBUTION

=>  IEC in Sports has been appointed global broadcast rights distributor for Chelsea on the club's two-game tour of Asia this summer. Chelsea will face a Malaysia XI in Kuala Lumpur on July 21, before heading to Bangkok for a match against the Thai All Stars on July 24. Promoter ProEvents is handling the arrangements for the tour. Chelsea, the reigning Premier League and FA Cup holders, last toured Asia in 2008, playing matches in China and Malaysia, but have spent the last two pre-seasons in USA.

=>  Japan’s J Sports has appointed MP & Silva as its adviser for international rights acquisitions in a deal that includes rights for the EPL and French Ligue 1. MP & Silva said it is already advising J Sports on the addition of more sports content ‘‘to further consolidate its market position as Japan’s leading sports broadcaster.’’ MP & Silva holds the Ligue 1 distribution rights in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, plus Premier League distribution rights in Japan and Vietnam. J Sports operates four premium sports channels in Japan and has a penetration of over 7.6 million households.

=>  French soccer club Lyon, is pushing for the LFP to launch its domestic broadcast rights tender soon. The LFP is set to launch the tender for rights this year to Ligue 1 from 2012-13 onwards. Lyon’s president Jean-Michel Aulas said that the value of Ligue 1 rights could yet rise to between €800 million ($1.09 billion) and €850 million per season, despite Orange’s stance and warning from Canal Plus that it will not offer more than the €465 million a season that it presently pays for rights. The LFP, the French professional soccer league, presently generates €668 million per season from rights deals with Canal Plus and Orange.

=> Germany’s DFL will not alter its fixture schedule for the Bundesliga by adding more kick-off times in the next domestic broadcast rights tender, covering 2013-14 onwards. As part of the television rights tender for the current period, DFL adopted 5 kick-off times (Fri: 8.30pm, Sat: 3.30pm & 6.30pm and Sun: 3.30pm & 5.30pm) in an attempt to give more exclusivity to pay-television. DFL aims to allocate the Bundesliga broadcast rights for the next contract cycle by May 2012. An average of €412 million ($564.5 million) per season was raised in the last tender for domestic broadcast rights fees through deals with Sky Deutschland, ARD and ZDF, Sport1 and Deutsche Telekom.

=>  German pubcasters, ARD and ZDF, said they will end live coverage of Tour de France next year because of the impact of recent doping scandals on German viewers’ acceptance of the race. The broadcasters are contracted to show live coverage from 2009 to 2011 in a deal by the EBU with ASO. ARD and ZDF confirmed that they will not enter a new rights deal for live coverage through EBU and will show news coverage of the race from next year in their sports shows. The cost of the live rights acquired by ARD and ZDF was reported to be between €3 mil ($4.15 million) and €3.5 mil each.

=> France's TF1 will share this year’s Rugby World Cup in New Zealand with two domestic networks after selling rights to a selection of games to France Télévisions and Canal Plus. France Télévisions and Canal Plus will pay a combined €13 million ($17.6 million) to TF1 for 28 matches. In 2004, TF1 bought rights for the 2007 and 2011 Rugby World Cups, paying €80 million and beating off a bid from France Télévisions to complete a deal with IMG. Last year, TF1 sub-licensed rights for 2010 World Cup to Canal Plus and France Télévisions for about €33 million, having spent €120 million on all the rights.

=>  Richard Lewis, chairman of UK’s Rugby Football League, has said he expects an "intense and competitive" bidding process for TV rights to the Super League and Challenge Cup competitions from 2012. BSkyB holds live rights for Super League, while the BBC has rights for the Challenge Cup. The pair paid a combined £50 million ($80.8 million) for a 3-year contract, beginning in 2009, which also included international matches. The RFL said that it had secured "a significant increase" when renewing the Super League rights last time around, with each club's annual share of the pot increasing from around £750,000 to more than £1 million.

=>  NFL won its battle with the NFL Players Association over TV revenue, after a special master ruled the league was entitled to receive $4 billion next season even if a labour dispute causes a lockout. The NFL hoped the ruling will encourage all parties to focus efforts on negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement before the present one expires in March. Failure to do so could result in the delay to, or cancellation of, the 2011 season beginning in September.

=>  Triumph Media Group has extended its agreement to sell international broadcast rights to the fights of boxers Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko. The new deal with Klitschko Management Group covers the worldwide rights for fights in 2011, with the exception of the territories of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, USA, Canada and Puerto Rico, where KMG will sell to broadcasters. Vitali Klitschko, the WBC heavyweight champion, will fight Cuba’s Odlanier Solis at the Lanxess Arena in Cologne on March 19, before Wladimir Klitschko, the WBO and IBF heavyweight title-holder, fights Britain’s Dereck Chisora in Mannheim on April 30.


BROADCAST

=>  ESPN Star Sports is considering a launch of 3D TV channel to capitalise on growing demand for the technology in the region. ESS showed its first EPL soccer match in 3D in January and has plans to expand the offering to other sports. Last year, ESS launched ESPN HD and ESPN Player broadband service, offering live coverage and a variety of online features. ESS is also stepping up its offering on 3G mobile phones, notably in India, where there are 700 million mobile phone subscribers and the broadcaster has two-year distribution deals with mobile phone operators Vodafone and Tata DoCoMo. ESS also teamed up with SingTel to launch the Mobile ESPN service in Singapore.

=>  Japan’s J Sports Broadcasting has signed a 5-year extension to its deal with wrestling’s WWE. The agreement gives J Sports exclusive pay-TV rights in Japan for WWE's weekly programming, which includes RAW, SmackDown, NXT, and, for the first time, WWE Superstars. In total, J Sports will show 6 hours of wrestling each week in HD.

=>  Fox USA is in line to break audience record for any US TV programme ever after overnight figures for the recent Super Bowl showed a remarkable 47.9 overnight rating. The rating for Green Bay Packers' exciting 31-25 defeat of Pittsburgh Steelers compares with a 46.4 overnight rating for last year's contest which earned CBS a record audience of 106.5 million viewers. The 47.9 rating ties the previous high figure, for Super Bowl XXI in 1987, when there were fewer television households. The NFL remains a huge TV draw and the Super Bowl audience has grown every year since 2005. Companies use the game to launch new commercials and the rate for 30-sec spots in this year’s game was about $3 million.


OTHER BUSINESS NEWS

=>  The World Squash Federation announced last week changes to how member nations are allocated hosting rights for world championships and conferences. The WSF said it is working to get the sport into the Olympics and believes that a more professional, formulaic calendar aimed at globalising the sport will stand it in good stead.

=>  The International Softball Federation has been told to work closer with the IBAF if it wants softball to remain in the Asian Games. Women's softball was confirmed by the Olympic Council of Asia and the 2014 organising committee on the list of sports to be contested in Incheon, South Korea. Softball has been part of the Asian Games since 1990, but reports suggested it would be dropped from the line-up for Incheon, following its exclusion from both the 2012 and 2016 Olympics. Softball has disengaged itself from baseball in a bid to return to the Olympic and the ISF has twice turned down approaches from the IBAF to mount a joint campaign for the re-inclusion of a men's baseball and women's softball competition in the games.

=>  Field hockey will be missing from a second successive SEA Games after the Indonesian organising committee for 2011 event did not include it on the list of sports. The 26th SEA Games will take place in Jakarta and Palembang from Nov 11 and 25 and is set to feature 43 sports and 542 medal events. Field hockey is the only Olympic and Asian Games sport to be excluded. When field hockey was left off the programme for the last SEA Games in Laos in 2009, the Asian Hockey Federation staged the inaugural SEA Cup in Bangkok, Thailand and it is considering holding the event again to make up for the latest snub.

=>  Singapore’s SingTel reported a 6.8% rise in revenue in Singapore and 19,000 new customers for its Mio TV IPTV service in Q4 of 2010. Q3 revenues in Singapore had totaled S$1.63 bil ($1.27 bil), while group revenue was up 5.7% to S$4.7 bil and group net profit climbed 0.8% to S$998 mil. The addition of 19,000 new Mio TV customers in the Q3 meant the IPTV service ended 2010 with a total of 264,000 customers. Q3 revenue at Mio TV came to S$21 million with 25,000 new subscribers in Q2 as SingTel began live coverage of the Premier League. In 2009, SingTel outbid StarHub with an offer reported to be worth between S$300 mil and S$400 mil for the rights to the English Premier League for the period from 2010/11 to 2012/13.

=>  Sepp Blatter, president of Fifa, has admitted vote trading took place in the contest to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, but claimed it did not affect the outcome in which Russia and Qatar were awarded the tournaments. It was rumoured, a deal was in place in which Spain-Portugal and Qatar had agreed to swap votes in support of one another for 2018 and 2022. The agreement was worth seven votes, exactly the number the Iberian bid received in both rounds of 2018 voting. It also accounted for more than half of the 12 votes Qatar needed to land 2022. Blatter admitted that it was a mistake to hold the two votes at the same time because it increased the chances of collusion.