Just a few years ago, the biggest sports holidays were a matter of course in the broadcasting of public television, today all stations on the Slovak market are fighting for them.
Head of the RTVS sports section Ján ŽGRAVČÁK explained why viewers recently had to look for a football duel between Slovakia and Liechtenstein on a private channel.
“The situation on the market is complex and it will always be a tough fight for broadcast rights,” he says in an interview with Aktuality.sk.
Viewers recently made you feel again on social networks that they cannot watch all qualifying matches of the national football team on RTVS. Try to explain to them why.
This is how the contract was signed roughly three years ago. Simply, UEFA, which holds the license, decided to trade the broadcasts in this way – that is, they split them into two packages and sell each one separately. I was not there when it was negotiated. The price decided, which is much higher than in the previous qualifying cycle for the package of all matches.
It is one of the approaches of selling license rights to sports broadcasting that have started to be applied around the world. Match broadcasts are easily shared. More television stations are interested in them and there is a huge overpressure. There are many broadcasters, fewer licenses. In order to be sold more expensively, they are offered to several entities, and this was the case that we could only get half of Slovakia’s qualifying meetings.
Unfortunately, of course we would prefer to broadcast the entire qualification. I would like it if the future qualification cycles were only on the screens of Šport.
Any chance of getting them?
We will participate in tenders. Next up is the tender for the World Cup in football. We are not the only ones interested in the Slovak market. Various international stations are also applying for rights for our territory, which is a completely new moment in the field of sports licenses.
Also, agencies that do not even have broadcasting services in the territory of the EU can obtain these rights. For example, Turkish companies that do not own any broadcasters, but still sell them broadcast rights and they then sublicense them. At the moment, the market is in a difficult situation. We are really curious to see how it will evolve and change.
The final tournament of Euro 2024 in Germany was won by the Markíza group. But for example, last year’s world football championship in the Czech Republic was shared by Czech Television with Nova. Can a similar situation arise here?
It always depends on what is specifically written in the contract – in this case we do not know it. There are different types of contracts. Are the contracts exclusive or ones that say you can sublicense further. And there are also those who forbid it.
If they would like to share with someone, they have to return the rights back to the rights licensor, who can then reach out to the other person. It is again a complicated process. Some of our contracts also state that we may not resell broadcasting rights. So this could also be the case for Markíza, if we were to show interest.
The tender for the 2026 World Cup will be more interesting in that the number of matches increases with a larger number of participants. There are up to 104 duels in the game, and there is quite a lot of talk about the fact that they can also be sold in “packages”, that is, not all 104 matches. We’ll see how they tear it apart and what the price will be. But we will try to have such top events on the screens of public television.
3 photos in the Football Studio gallery at RTVS. Source: RTVS
It will probably be a tough battle for Slovak stations.
Of course. Everyone: Markíza with its digital platform, Joj or RTVS have the ability to broadcast sports and its exclusive content. It will also be questionable how the market will behave when other streaming services enter the fray.
Amazon has already bought something, and when others become interested in sports broadcasts, public television will have a very difficult time keeping up with them. The cost of the licenses will go much higher, and they are already not small.
You have only recently launched a sports channel and are gradually losing the broadcast rights to major events. Joj is broadcasting some of Petra Vlhová’s races, she won the WC in hockey…
Basically, we only found out after the launch of the sports channel that we had lost some broadcasting rights. For example, also for the hockey extra league. The agreement was signed between the Slovak Ice Hockey Association and Joj two years ago – before the launch of Šport.
We didn’t know what obscenity was, but that’s just how it was. I wouldn’t want to evaluate the World Cup in hockey, but it certainly shouldn’t have been lost. When that happened, it wasn’t good. We are trying to do our best to bring this, the most important annual hockey tournament for Slovakia, back to RTVS.
Do you feel that some of your rights have been blown away by the competition, so much so that you are now gluing broadcasts in Sport?
It’s not like that. We have enough licenses. They are traded in such a way that you have so-called A or B content. In many cases, you don’t get a license for just one event or sport, but they pack more. We have enough of such content and it will not be a problem to arrange the broadcast with them. But the point is that we also need to have A-level content.
If it is to make sense to give the viewer something they want to see, then in a sense we also have a public duty to bring socially significant events. This is how it is written in the law and we must strive for it. Of course, objective reasons can also come into play and we may not succeed, but we have to try. Now we have lost some things, but we are not giving up the fight.
Was it practically about being outbid by competition in the broadcast rights market?
I cannot comment on this in full detail, as I was not personally at the negotiations at the time. But it could be generalized like this. Simply, the funding in those years was not exactly in favor of RTVS.
Even in 2023, the budget is lower than it should have been. It had to be cut and literally cut. However, since we managed to systematically solve the financing of RTVS, I believe that better times are on the way. We will be able to stabilize the sport financially and we will be able to plan things according to the budget for several years ahead.
According to our information at the Finnish YLE, they have approximately 80 million euros per year for sports programming, including production. Incomparable to our ten million. And it is as numerous a nation as we are.
What could be the solution?
We would like to start a really constructive discussion about the importance of broadcasting live broadcasts of sporting (but not only sporting) events that represent Slovakia abroad and give us good publicity.
For example, the Slovak Cycling Association was able to push for the broadcast of the Okolo Slovakia race on the pan-European Eurosport platform, but it had nothing to finance the half-million dollar production, the state had no money for it.
If every year we were able to select important events that have a societal significance and that must be broadcast by national television, it could bring a lot of content back to RTVS. This is nothing new even in advanced Western democracies. It works in the UK, for example
Are you preparing a “plan B” during the European Championship in football, which is broadcast by Markíza, in such a way that you will develop this event with football studies or debates?
We are thinking creatively about what and how we will offer the viewer in this period. We cannot pretend that the Euro does not exist when the whole nation will live by it. This is how we have to look at it. We want our program to be attractive. We intend to use our expertise.
Viewers consider sports presenters and editors of RTVS as experts who have something to say about football. We also have a number of experts that we have cultivated over the years and want to continue working with us. Therefore, we are concerned with how to attend to these events. At the same time, we are fighting for additional licenses.
3 photos in the gallery Head of the sports section at RTVS Ján Žgravčák. Source: RTVS
How will it be with the broadcasting of Slovan and Trnava in the Conference League?
Interestingly, the European and Conference and UEFA Champions League qualifiers – which are played during the summer – have a very strong meaning. The viewership was very good and it resonated with people. Gradually the numbers grew and here it must be said that we managed to get licenses for the preliminary rounds for the next three seasons.
On the other hand, we lost the main stages of the competition. A competitor managed to buy them. It is said that this was the highest percentage increase in the license fee for a broadcaster that was recorded in Europe. This is the Conference and Europa League sold in one package.
We asked that these competitions be divided, but they did not agree to this. We are now broadcasting the final season of the Europa League and Conference League. It is a contract that is valid for three years and we only have one game for the first choice.
What does this mean for the audience?
That we have to choose whether to broadcast Trnava or Slovan and the second choice belongs to the broadcaster AMC (Sport1, Sport2, note). Also, AMC has second, third, fourth and all other selections. When we approached him about giving us the option to buy the fourth pick –– he told us he didn’t want to talk about it anyway.
AMC plans to broadcast Slovan or Trnava – that is, the second Slovak team that we will not choose at RTVS. Unfortunately, although we were interested in entering these negotiations, we were rejected. They have the right to do so, because this is how the contract was signed.
In the future, we will probably think about whether there is a better chance for two or three Slovak teams to reach the group stage of the competition. This has not happened until now and we could not have known this 3-4 years ago when negotiating the contract. So it is true that we have a contract for one game and the first pick.
The highest football league is also not broadcast on RTVS.
Exactly. Markíza has the league. It would be nice if we could broadcast at least one match a week. But again it depends on them if they want to talk about it. We are interested in that. We want to have Slovak league competitions on our screens.
We broadcast handball, basketball and we would be happy if we could also confirm the hockey extra league in the future. We will be broadcasting the Niké League soccer magazine, where we plan to bring attractive changes for viewers. Despite this, the sports offer at RTVS is still rich.
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2023-09-23 00:00:00
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