AlJazeera Sports won the exclusive rights to broadcast the UEFA Champions League in the Arab world, this is my favorite football league, I even like it more than the World Cup, and by this AlJazeera adds another interesting football league to its bouquet that includes the Italian League (Calcio) and the Spanish League (La Lega).
This is a big loss for the ART (Arab Radio & Television), which personally I don’t like, in the past they used to own the rights of almost everything, but now with the existence of a lot of players like Rotana, Showtime, AlJazeera Sports, Orbit, MBC and Melody, they do struggle to exist.
ART was the first to prevent millions in the Arab world from watching the World Cup, which is considered the most important sport event in the world, they forced everyone who wants to watch the world cup to subscribe to their whole channels, how desperate they are.
Not only that, they own the rights for Arab Champions League and majority the local football leagues in the Arab world. So in order to watch your local football league you will have to pay to ART, but again AlJazeera Sports isn’t much better, they are not doing it for free.
Once I was in a meeting with executives from AlJazeera Sports, one of them was so excited when he was telling me how they helped Showtime to beat ART and to win the rights of the English Premiere League, I asked him why not AlJazeera? He said we can’t have our own studios in London because it’s over crowded with buildings, and this will prevent us from offering a comprehensive coverage so we decided to leave it to Showtime. What a cold war, ha?
In addition to football, I like tennis and thank god that my favorite tennis championship “Roland Garros” is free till now and I hope it remains like that this year.
But this raises the question about PPV television vs. Free-to-air television, which is more profitable?
Media needs advertising money in order to survive, once I read a report by Arab Advisors about a drop in TV advertising costs due to the existence of many channels, even it exceeded the 4 Billion USD$ in 2007, according to IPSOS, this number didn’t seem big enough for some channels to remain in the free-to-air side.
AlJazeera Sports is talking about 1 million subscribers in its channels, the subscription fees is something between 70$ – 100$ a year, and with the addition of UEFA Champions League, I’m sure it will jump to 150$ a year, so we are talking about 150 million $ a year, could double in the coming couple of years since AlJazeera Sports will attract more audience.
But how attractive is an audience of 1 million for advertisers compared to the audience of a free-to-air television?
