Published:
16-Jul-08
The Dutch football league is launching its Eredivisie Live service on cable, digital terrestrial and IPTV networks on the first day of the new season, 29 August. A joint venture between Eredivisie CV, the media and marketing body formed by the 18 league football clubs, and production company Endemol, the new service has secured carriage deals with cable operators Ziggo and UPC, telco Tele2 and DTT/IPTV operator KPN. No agreement has so far been announced with satellite service Canal Digitaal. The financiers have agreed to pay the Dutch clubs a guaranteed €60m.
Ziggo and UPC are both offering Eredivisie Live for a subscription fee of €9.95 a month (first three months will cost €6 for UPC subscribers). The service, consisting of four channels, will only be available to digital subscribers. UPC will offer matches on a pay-per-view basis to non-subscribers, with matches between big clubs like Ajax and FC Feyenoord costing €7 and other matches €5. KPN said it would offer two channels on its Digitenne digital terrestrial platform and on IPTV service KPN TV and one channel on mobile TV. Subscription tariffs will range from €10 to €15 per month.
Our take...ECV invited tenders for a four-year contract to show live matches earlier in the year but decided to launch its own channel after it was unhappy with the offers received. Tele 2, which was awarded most live rights in the last contract round, signed up too few customers to justify the cost of the contract and last season sublicensed matches to Ziggo, UPC and Digitenne.
Even in the football-mad Netherlands, exclusive access to weekly league football was not appealing enough to allow a new service to establish itself. However, Belgacom, which was awarded domestic league rights in Belgium at the same time as Tele 2, has had considerably more success and has renewed its contract with the Belgian national league for another three years.
UPC and Ziggo will both be able to use Eredivisie Live to accelerate digital take-up, which has so far been sluggish. At the end of the first quarter, UPC had only 560,000 digital subs compared to 2.1m overall. One million of Ziggo's 3.2m subscribers are digital. Both operators are planning to offer deferred matches on a video-on-demand basis and Ziggo will launch HD coverage if capacity is available.
Netherlands,
