Premier letdown for soccer viewers
- Source: Global Times
- [09:03 August 16 2010]
- Comments
Two men walk past a sign bearing the logo of SMG, controller of the content of Shanghai Sports Channel. Photo: IC
By Shen Weihuang
With other stations around the country vying for the rights to broadcast this season's English Premier League games, Shang-hai Sports Channel was forced on Saturday evening to put the matches earlier scheduled to air live from England on hold and leave local fans disappointed.
Shanghai Sports Channel bought the rights to broadcast premiership matches in China this year. It is currently in talks with other channels across the country - including the Chi-nese mainland's largest broad-caster, CCTV - over reselling them.
According to a producer at Shanghai Sports Channel, who preferred not to be named, ob-jections from the channels it is currently in negotiations with forced it to cancel the showing of games until the rights deals have been finalized. He said not complying would mean the rights would fetch less money. He added that the deals should be closed within the next couple of weeks. "We'll probably start broadcasting the league games from the third round," he told the Global Times yesterday.
The no-show on Saturday night left fans like British man David Green and his friends feeling cheated out of the first game.
"We were so angry, we al-most threw our beer at the TV," he told the Global Times yester-day.
The Shanghai Sports Chan-nel began airing English Pre-mier League games in the 1990s, some of them pre-re-corded. No games were shown from the 2007/8 and 2008/9 soccer seasons due to broad-casting preparations for the Beijing Olympics. The matches resumed through a live feed in 2009, when ratings for the Shanghai Sports Channel went through the roof, with more viewers tuning in during the games compared to regular programming, according to fig-ures from international media consultancy Nielsen.
Disputes between Shanghai Sports Channel and other tele-vision stations have occurred before. The most recent was in July during the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. The channel was suddenly forced to cancel its broadcasts planned for several matches due to a dis-pute with CCTV, which wanted to be the sole provider.
