Premiership Business Sense?

Originally posted by FMF
In Indonesia, the Premiership had about 50 million viewers on free-to-air live TV for the last 4 or 5 years. Suddenly the rights have been sold to a cable company in Jakarta with about 600,000 subscribers, for a few hundred thousand dollars more than the terrestial TV station was paying. What kind of business sense does the lost exposure for Premiership and its donesia). Is this just more amatuerish dumbness like that ITV premiership deal a few yearsback?

The cable company has great business sense, it's subscriber numbers will rocket due to demand to watch the Premiership.

Why do you think the Prem is on Sky and not the BBC in Britain?

Edit: i don't think the Prem or Sponsors will see a big difference, Indonesia is not their key target market, except maybe for the Brewer that sponsors Everton.

Originally posted by rhb
The cable company has great business sense, it's subscriber numbers will rocket due to demand to watch the Premiership.

Actually no, it doesn't work like that here. A month's cable subscription is about the same as a month's wages for an ordinary person. The number of cable subscribers will go up from 600,000 to about 800,000 and the the other 49,800,000 will watch the Italian Seri A for free on the terrestial channel that used to broadcast the Premiership. The Italians will twig and squeeze commercial benefit out of the fact that droves of people in massive Asian cities like Jakarta and Surabaya are locked in. The 2006 World Cup was snapped up by cable too and it was a commercial flop for them. Subscriptions didn't rocket. The scoop was announced a few days before the first game kicked off. Suddenly Indonesians weren't going to get to watch the soccer after all. People were urged to buy decoders which turned out not to pick up the games. People just turned their back on the World Cup. It was a commercial shambles. The previous World Cup and the 2004 European Nations Cup were free to air and avidly followed. Mobile phone companies, Asian beer brands, tobacco companies etc. made loads of money reaching tens of millions of people. Reducing the whole thing to a question of an extra 200,000 viewers from a base of 600,000 sounds like amateur business sense by all parties concerned. I predict that the cable company will renage on the deal mid-season. Rather like ITV a few years back: too expensive, not enough people watching.