English football is widely watched on TV (and often heavily gambled on) everywhere in Asia, except China. The reason for that is that the games have been on WinTV since 2007 when the subscription service outbid free to air broadcasters for China rights to the games. The size of the viewing audience has reportedly fallen from 30 million to about 20,000 following the switch.
Now Bloomberg reports that the English Premier League, worried that its big clubs are missing out on a potentially lucrative merchandising market and the game is at risk in its global marketing battle with basketball, is trying to get the matches back on free TV.
It is reportedly brokering a consortium of advertisers to buy the China rights when they next come up in 2010. The consortium would then give the games to CCTV for broadcast. No names of whom the advertisers might be, but they are “world-wide brands in the sporting goods, soft drinks and alcoholic beverage industries”, Phil Lines, the Premier League’s head of international broadcasting and media operations, told Bloomberg.
Novel approach to sports media rights and a further sign of the potential importance of the domestic Chinese market to global businesses.
Update: The Offside, a football blog, has a more skeptical take on the EPL’s proposal.
1. WinTV is not pay-per-view: it’s a subscription channel.
2. CCTV did not hold the rights in the previous period (2004 – 2007), nor the one before that (2001 – 2004).
3. English soccer is widely watched in Southeast Asia, but not the rest of the continent.
Fair point about subscription vs pay-per-view, so we’ve changed the text. Thanks for pointing that out.
-CB.