English Entertainment
ESS scores big; secures soccer World Cup 2006 rights
MUMBAI: ESPN Star Sports (ESS) has just added the biggest soccer property of them all to its draw card. The sports broadcaster has acquired exclusive telecast rights for the Indian subcontinent for the 2006 Fifa World Cup to be held in Germany.
The Fifa World Cup, the globe’s biggest sporting spectacle after the Olympics (and which rates much higher on the passion scale) will showcase a month of soccer frenzy from 9 June to 9 July 2006.
ESS struck the deal with Infront Sports & Media, which is world footballs governing body Fifa’s exclusive television partner for the event. ESS will have full and exclusive coverage of the event. This latest acquisition is the icing on the cake for ESS which already has the English Premier League, Spanish Primera Liga, Uefa Champions League, Uefa Cup and the FA Cup package in its kitty.
As a runup to the big event ESS has a lineup of properties which will be used to build up the momentum. In June this year, the broadcaster will be showcasing the action from the Fifa World Youth Championships. The event kicks off in the Netherlands on 10 June, 2005.
This will be followed immediately by the Fifa Confederations Cup 2005 which starts in Germany from 15 June, 2005 and will be played across five German cities. The event concludes on 29 June 2005. The Confederations Cup 2005 will see hosts Germany against Olympic champions Argentina, Australia and Tunisia. While in Group B defending World Cup champions Brazil will take on the European champions Greece as well as Japan and Mexico.
Just how big the World Cup is can be gauged from the benefit the previous rights holder Ten Sports got in 2002. The event had served as a launching pad for the Bukhatir owned broadcaster giving it distribution across the country.
One issue that will crop up is Doordarshan’s insistence on it being given the feed for events of “national importance”. Last year both ESS (Bangladesh tour) and Ten Sports (Pakistan tour) suffered as a result though it was cricket that was in play. While Ten was forced to give its feed to DD for India’s historic tour of Pakistan in March, ESS faced the music when India toured Bangladesh in December.
Asked to comment on this, ESS India MD RC Venkateish said he was awaiting the Supreme Court’s verdict on the matter where Ten Sports’ appeal is also pending. “We are hopeful that our interests will be safeguarded. We will also seek the cooperation of the local police in case our signal is stolen by cable operators during the World Cup,” Venkateish opined.
“One thing that cable operators are realising is that ESS is not about one or two big events. So this year regardless of the fate of the India cricket rights I do not expect to face any problems on the ground,” Venkateish asserted. It may be recalled that in 2002 Ten Sports had taken stringent action against erring cable operators who attempted to steal its signal for the World Cup.
On a more positive note Venkateish said that in the lead up to the World Cup the channel will come out with a host of specials. These will focus on the key players as well as how the teams are preparing. “This latest acquisition means that more than 25 million households in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal and Bhutan will watch our coverage of the event. We will have English and Hindi commentary, daily pre-shows during match days, a daily review show as well as special lead-up programming.
“The surge in ratings for the telecast of the Euro 2004 in the Indian market clearly shows the growing popularity of soccer in India. Our investment in localising our content and adding Hindi commentary definitely added further in increasing the penetration for the game resulting in an increase in TRPs.”
On the marketing front one can expect roadshows as well as the different media to be used to get the message across to football fans.
A mad rush for tickets: Meanwhile tickets for the World Cup went on sale yesterday over the internet. However, fans in Britain were angry that the only credit card they can use to buy them is Mastercard.
A spokesman for Fifa said: “It’s true that Mastercard is the exclusive card at this stage of the process, but no objection has been raised by the European Commission and there are other payment methods.
“Every customer throughout the world has two months to place his or her order for tickets. All the orders will be registered and if there is a surplus of demand, a draw will be made. There has never been a more transparent or fairer approach to sale of tickets for such an event.”
Applications for tickets came from 108 countries including Burkina Faso and Macao, although the vast majority — around 80 per cent — were from within Germany. Not surprisingly demand for the final match on 9 July 2006 is the highest. The overall demand is also high despite the fact that Germany is still the only nation to be certain of qualifying for the 32-team event.
UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
