22 March 2007

Now TV is going ape over sports package
By Barclay Crawford
South China Morning Post
(c) 2007 South China Morning Post Publishers Limited, Hong Kong. All rights reserved.

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch once famously described sport as the “battering ram” that brought people to pay TV. PCCW’s Now TV seems to think a gorilla is a better metaphor.

Now TV used the great ape yesterday to launch four sports channels and promote its jewel in the crown - the exclusive rights to screen next season's English Premier League soccer that was snatched from competitor i-Cable Communications for a record US$200 million for three seasons. There was fanfare with a gorilla mascot and gorilla T-shirts trumpeting a bigger and better sports pack.

Bullish PCCW executive director Alex Arena yesterday said it could “rightly claim to be taking over the leadership of the pay television industry” and boasted Now was the Hong Kong home of all the world's big football competitions.

Vivek Couto, director of Media Partners Asia, said it would need a three-part strategy of more subscribers paying higher fees and greater advertising revenue to justify the “ridiculous” money it paid for the English league.

“The fees people are willing to pay are a big part of it,” he said.

Mr Couto said i-Cable was obviously prepared to drop subscribers and was hoping that diversifying content by localising it would limit losses. “They haven't just lost the UK's EPL, they also have lost popular stations such as HBO.”

After the promotional launch, Mr Arena said the company had built its brand successfully without Mr Murdoch's “battering ram” and had bid for the league because of demand from subscribers.

“The English Premiership was not available to us and we had to do our best without it,” he said. “But people liked what we were doing with the Champions League and they wanted us to have the Premiership and we want to take coverage to the next level.”

However, a spokesman for i-Cable said the provider was “unconcerned” about losing the league's rights and it was determined to build a "more balanced" product.

The station has flagged the introduction of a free Chinese entertainment channel in the second quarter and cuts to the subscription fee of up to 40 per cent.

He said it had yet to see any big change in the rate in which it was acquiring or losing subscribers since it was announced in November that Now TV had won the league rights.

“We actually managed to grow our subscriber numbers by 7 per cent by the end of December to 786, 000,” the spokesman said.