By a bid close to 35 million eurosTVE has acquired the rights to broadcast the World Cup Qatar 2022to be held from November 21 to December 18 in the Arab monarchical state.
According to what VerTele has exclusively advanced, the public entity se has been imposed on the Mediapro auction, which expected to disburse about 50 million euros in the operation. A figure to which TVE would have come closer, surpassing the private television groups.
24 years without World Cups on TVE
A) Yes, TVE would broadcast a World Cup for the first time since France 1998, the last one seen in public. Korea 2002 would already be broadcast on Vía Digital and Antena 3 (the obligatory free-to-air), Germany 2006 would be shared between Canal+ and laSexta and since 2010 the FIFA championship has been broadcast in its entirety on Mediaset.
This news joins the announcement a week ago that La 1 will broadcast the Champions League final that will be held, predictably, on May 28 in Saint Petersburg. Which could indicate that public television is looking for how it can get back to being competitive.
RTVE and La 1 in particular have been in the doldrums for a few years. It is no longer just the fact that it is behind Antena 3 and Telecinco, but that it is no longer able to compete with the private channels. And in this fight for audiences is where this outlay makes sense.
The football war and its inflated prices
Because at the profitability level, it is public money that falls on deaf ears. Currently, football rights are prohibitive (for comparison, the Tokyo Olympics were 60 million euros) and barely manage to be compensated by advertising revenue on free-to-air channels, even less when you can only have sponsorships as is the case with the public one
But they are not very profitable either for pay television (Movistar Plus +) or subscription services such as DAZN, that you are announcing to your clients a substantial raise of the quota that you laugh at Netflix and its periodic uploads.
Returning to the audiences, a sporting event of this magnitude is bread for today and hunger for tomorrow. They may win in viewers, but retention is something else. With nine months to go, now TVE has to make an effort to present a powerful program by the end of the year and bombard the World Cup broadcast with promos in such a way that they manage to scratch and maintain some of the audience peak that is coming.