VietNamNet Bridge – While the controversy over K+ doesn’t cease, the public is upset by the information that a private firm - AVG - has held the broadcast right of the national football championship V-League for 20 years.

Exclusive broadcasting rights hit football audience

1 million people sign to protest cable TV channel

The race among television broadcasters is said to push up the copyright fees, resulting in higher fees for football fans.

It is reported that AVG has reached an agreement with the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) on holding the exclusive broadcast right of the V-League for the next two decades. This firm is negotiating with other sports federations to purchase the broadcast right of other sport events.

AVG’s move attracts public attention because this is the first time other kinds of sports, not only football – most popular in Vietnam – is in question.

According to information from the AFF, AVG will pay VND6 billion dong ($300,000) annually, doubling the pay from the national Vietnam Television (VTV) or VTC. In addition, the pay will rise by 10 percent yearly, plus 20 percent from advertising profit.

Some VFF officials also said that it is more comfortable to cooperate with AVG than VTV, which often expressed a “haughty” attitude.

With these factors, it seems that AVG is much better partner than VTV or VTC.

However, fans worry that AVG may be the second K+.

Though AVG stated that it would allow other broadcasters like VTV, VTC, HTV, etc. to broadcast V-League without “earning profit” but it has to pay billion dong of copyright fees to V-League, so it will have to seek money from broadcasting V-League.

“Commercializing entertaining TV channels is an indispensable trend of modern media. This is a good sign because once competition among broadcasters is fiercer, they will have to try to better serve the audience,” analyzed Dr. Nguyen Van Dung from the Institute for Press and Broadcasting.

Dr. Do Thu Hang, also from the Institute for Press and Broadcasting, warned broadcasters to not only be after profit and neglect low-income audience, otherwise they will be boycotted.

She said that the government should have specific regulations on information supply for the media and giving priority to national broadcasters in purchasing the broadcast right of national events.

The lesson from Singapore

Early this year, the Singaporean media market experienced an unprecedented situation.

The two largest TV broadcasters SingTel and StarHub announced that Singaporeans might have to watch the World Cup 2010 in Malaysia because they couldn’t afford to buy the broadcast right from the FIFA.

The reason was that they competed to buy the broadcast right, which pushed up the copyright fees to a very high level.

Hundreds of people demonstrated to boycott the two broadcasters. This was a rare demonstration in this country. Nearly 30,000 people joined a campaign on Facebook which called the audience to boycott the two channels because their competition made the fees for watching the World Cup seven times higher than that in 2006.

The Singaporean authorities immediately banned the exclusive broadcast right of all sport tournaments and told the two broadcasters to cooperate with each other to serve the people.

Finally, SingTel and StarHub had to pay only $15 million to FIFA to air the World Cup on both channels. The price was equivalent to the half of the initial price.

Earlier, the two broadcasters’ race for the English Premier League broadcast right turned Singapore into the most expensive country for watching football.

Singaporean Minister of Information, Communications and Art Lui Tuck Yew admitted that the theory “the market will self regulate” is wrong in this case.

Vietnam’s media management agencies should learn from Singapore to prevent losses for the audience.

Lan Huong