26 July - 1 August 2001
Issue No.544
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 26 July - 1 August 2001 Issue No.544 |
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Paying for air
What happens when a nation of football buffs is deprived of the opportunity to watch the year's most important matches? Alaa Shahin heads for the neighbourhood coffee shop
Hamdi Bayoumi, the owner of a coffee shop in the residential area of Medinet Nasr, found his shop overrun by a wave of customers last month. It wasn't the coffee which drew them in droves; it was the football match between Egypt's U-20 national football team and Jamaica in the Youth World Cup being played in Argentina -- a match being exclusively televised on the private satellite TV network, Arab Radio and Television (ART).
Glued to the TV screen: how much will football fanatics have to pay to keep up with the latest moves?
In spite of a frustrating and scoreless tie between Egypt and the little-fancied Jamaican team, public venues nationwide lucky enough to have an ART subscription were inundated with crowds of zealous Egyptian football fans. Bayoumi quickly realised he only had to take two steps to find the goose that lays golden eggs: he needed to buy three television sets to add to the two large screens already in his shop, and set a minimum charge for viewing.
He took these measures with no little sense of guilt. "As a citizen, I hated what I did because a lot of people can't afford this [pay-TV] and they only paid because of their love of the game, and so they could watch Egypt playing at one of the most prestigious football showdowns," Bayoumi confessed to Al-Ahram Weekly. "In the end I had to do this because Egypt's seven matches in the tournament [which ended on 18 July] brought in a month's-worth of workers' wages in addition to other expenses. On normal days we do not get that many customers."
But Bayoumi's profits are petty compared with the big players in the game of private TV. Prior to the championship, ART demanded $400,000 from Egyptian Television for the rights to air the games in which Egypt would be playing on Egypt TV's terrestrial channels. Negotiations, however, reached a deadlock as the Egyptian TV's bid did not exceed $160,000. To compensate for the inability to reach an agreement, the Ministry of Youth subscribed to ART and set up large screens at major youth centres nationwide.
With the World Cup looming next summer, football fans will be forced to dig even deeper into their pockets to be able to watch the game.
"The real problem started this year when FIFA decided to deal with private companies other than the radio and television organisations of Arab countries," Hassan Hamed, head of the Egyptian Radio and Television Union, told Al-Ahram Weekly. He said the winning company paid approximately $86 million to gain the rights to air the 2002 World Cup matches. "It then started to sell these rights to Arab countries in return for huge sums of money. They asked Egyptian Radio and Television for $40 million and then came down to $20 million, a sum we could not pay. After all, Arab countries used to pay about $6 million for similar matches."
The appropriation of exclusive football rights by private TV, which has been on the cards for some time, is now a fait accompli. Back in 1999 ART, which is owned by Saudi magnate Sheikh Saleh Kamel, bought the exclusive broadcasting rights for the Confederations Cup, in which both Egypt and Saudi Arabia were taking part. At the time, there were fewer public venues with subscriptions, and the resultant overcrowding inevitably led to quarrels, and in many cases the police were called in.
As far as the man on the street is concerned, ART is taking advantage of his passion for soccer to milk the average citizen. People who wanted to watch the matches at home could only do so after having bought an LE950 decoder, as well as a monthly subscription starting at LE65. "For people who already own a decoder, an LE65 monthly subscription would mean nothing. But what about other people who can't afford to buy or lease a decoder?" asked Ahmed Hazim, who was watching the Egypt-Jamaica match, while nearby three people in the coffee shop were arguing with the waiter over the imposition of a minimum charge.
For the sophisticate who promotes the private media as the way to the future, ART has merely introduced the world of private TV to Egypt. "ART was perfectly within its rights," argued Osama El- Sheikh, former ART regional manager and currently the general manager of Dream TV, a private Egyptian channel due to be launched next October. "Especially when you take into consideration the merciless competition in this field. The private channels' only winning horse is a large audience. And to attract this audience, they have to fight for exclusive material and events," he added.
El-Shiekh, who was with ART when it took the TV rights for the 1999 Confederations Cup, cited a growing Egyptian understanding of the pay-TV concept. "In 1999, people did not believe Egyptian television would not be televising the tournament," he said. "Only when the first match kicked off did they begin to grasp the situation. This time, the situation was calm, partly because of the government's advance announcement that it would not be televising the championship, as well as a growing understanding of the concept of pay-TV."
For better or worse, it seems to be the trend of the modern world. In their Winners and Losers, the Business Strategy of Football, Stefan Szymanski and Tim Kuypers explain that pay-TV has moved from a loss-making, high-risk venture to a large, profitable and still-growing business. In 1997, the British media giant BskyB had a turnover of £1.2 billion, achieving a phenomenal £374 million in profits, a 26 per cent increase on the previous year. Direct-to-Home subscriptions were the most important source of revenue, representing some 72 per cent of turnover; of the remainder, cable subscriptions accounted for 12 per cent of turnover and advertising for 11 per cent. In this money-making feast, sports is the special dish. The trends were summed up in a 1996 quote by Rupert Murdoch, part owner of BskyB, who then described the acquisition of sports rights as a "battering ram" for the expansion of his television network.
But within this high-powered and fiercely competitive global market, do Egyptian entrepreneurs have a chance? In 1998 Ehab Saleh, a businessman who owns a football marketing company, introduced a project to encode football matches: each family would pay LE150 for a simple UHF decoder, and only one pound for a card to watch each match. "There are eight million families who own televisions in Egypt," he said. "If only five million bought this decoder, imagine the profits that could be made out of the 64-match World Cup," he told the Weekly. Saleh claims he received verbal consent for his project from former Prime Minister Kamal El-Ganzouri, but that the project was finally turned down. "The government evaluated the project on political grounds. They said football was like air and water for the Egyptian people. But don't we all pay for water nowadays?" he said.
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