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BROADCASTING

Serie A foreign TV rights sold for €371m

International broadcasting rights for Serie A football over the next four years have been sold for twice as much as the previous four-year period, the league announced.

Published: 11 October 2017 12:55 CEST
Serie A foreign TV rights sold for €371m
StockImage/Depositphotos

US sports and entertainment management group IMG and Italy's public TV broadcaster RAI bought the global rights for 2018 to 2021 for €371 million ($438 million), with RAI broadcasting to “Italian communities abroad”,
La Lega Serie A said on Tuesday.

The sum paid is double that of the €186 million ($219 million) forked out for the previous period, from 2015 to 2018.

IMG beat London-based favourites MP & Silva, who bid higher, after the US group impressed with a superior project to promote Serie A overseas, according to Italian media. Eighteen of the twenty top flight Italian clubs voted in favour of the IMG offer.

“It's very satisfying because it ranks Serie A third in terms of financial value behind the Premier League and La Liga and way in front of the Bundesliga,” said Luigi Di Servio, managing director of sports marketing
company Infront, which advised Serie A on the broadcasting rights dossier.

Italian football federation president Carlo Tavecchio added: “We've established the value of Italian football, by doubling revenues earned by Lega Serie A on the previous sale.”

For the domestic market, broadcasting rights for the 2015 to 2018 period in Italy reached €945 million ($1.1 billion).

MEDIA

Up to 10 million people could be hit by threatened radio shut down

The airwaves across many parts of Germany could fall silent next week due to a financial dispute between radio stations and an FM broadcasting provider.

Published: 6 April 2018 16:08 CEST
Up to 10 million people could be hit by threatened radio shut down
Photo: DPA

The company Media Broadcast announced on Friday that it would cut off FM broadcasters for several radio stations if they did not immediately fulfil certain payment demands.

“Up to 10 million radio listeners could be affected by their FM broadcaster being cut off from Wednesday onwards,” company head Wolfgang Breuer told Die Welt.

Major public service broadcasters such as MDR, NDR and Deutschlandfunk are among those who could be cut off, the newspaper reported.

The dispute began when Media Broadcast, formerly a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, decided to move focus away from FM radio and onto digital platforms last year.

The shift meant that broadcasting antennae across Germany, for which Media Broadcast had previously been responsible, were sold to private investors.

Broadcasters and their network operators were then left furious when many of the new owners raised prices for the use of their antennae, leading to a stalemate in business negotiations.

Hessian broadcaster FFH told dpa that a 50 percent rise in the cost of antennae use had left them with a “massive problem”.

In order to break the stalemate, Media Broadcast recently agreed to continue operating all antennae until the end of June, so as to provide more time for negotiations. Yet such an arrangement would still require the stations to contract the company during that period.

Media Broadcast now claims that around 75 percent of stations have not done this, and has threatened to cut these stations off if they do not officially contract the company by Monday.

Though digital and online streaming radio will still be available, the mass cut-off of FM radio broadcasts would affect a huge proportion of the population.

According to Bild, around 92.7 percent of Germans said they still preferred listening to radio on an analogue device in a poll last year.