Ordinary Gweilo

Wednesday’s SCMP had a short piece about the English Premier League coverage moving from Cable TV to Now Broadband TV (Premier League loss not end of world for i-Cable):

Badge of honour

At Now TV, meanwhile, executives are proud of their Premiership coup, but they can’t talk about it as much as they like because Cable TV remains the exclusive rights holder until the end of May. PCCW people attending this week’s ITU Telecom World are wearing badges proclaiming: “Now TV – We Love Football”, but without mentioning the Premier League.

Alex Arena, PCCW executive director, told us that Now TV won’t begin advertising the Premiership until June.

The US$200 million that PCCW reportedly paid for the three-year football package is too much, according to some people in the industry but don’t tell that to Mr Arena. He said the deal is very cost-effective.

“Our competitors say the rights aren’t worth that much? That might be true if we were only leveraging on one or two delivery platforms,” he replied.

“But PCCW has four platforms – Now TV, the internet, mobile phones, even fixed-line phones. Our costs are not very high when you calculate the returns according to this new model.”

He held out the tantalising possibility that next year PCCW could become the first carrier in the world to broadcast football matches live to mobile phones. The obstacle until now has been overheating of the handset battery but Mr Arena said the CMB technology licensed to PCCW Mobile by Huawei Technologies gets around the problem.

“The CMB technology allows us to broadcast a match in a way that consumes less battery power. Users should be able to watch a full 90-minute match on their phones,” Mr Arena said. Not only Huawei handsets support the service, he added.

Another advance that could arrive along with the Premiership matches is high-definition television. The Premier League is keen to have its games shown in HDTV format, though Mr Arena wouldn’t say if it would happen next year.

He said Now has ample transmission capacity and plans to show every Premiership match live. He declined to say how much customers will be asked to pay for the service.

When I wrote about this previously, Henry pointed out that PCCW were advertising in the Chinese press promoting the ESPN/Star Sports channel and offering a 2 year contract at the current price (HK$88/month).  The problem with this is that it is not clear how much of the coverage you will get for your $88.  It’s probably reasonable to assume that this will be similar to what ESPN/Star offered last time they had the EPL in Hong Kong, but with up to 4 live games simultaneously (for the Saturday 3pm games) as they currently do with the Champions League.  However, there’s no guarantee of that, nor is there any indication how much they will charge for other services – I think it’s likely that there will be a dedicated EPL channel (similar to Cable TV current offering) and a VOD service.  As the SCMP suggest, it’s also possible they could offer a premium rate HDTV service (though personally I’d just settle for normal definition rather than the distinctly low-definition picture I get from Cable TV).

I am rather dubious about the idea of broadcasting football to mobile phones.  Highlights maybe, but who wants to watch a whole game on a tiny screen?