The winners and losers in the 2018 World Cup broadcast battle
With the drama almost faded, Victoria University’s Mark C-Scott looks back at the real winners and losers of the 2018 FIFA World Cup: Australia’s broadcasters.
France might have won the 2018 World Cup title, but who were the real winners in the broadcast battle? Not everyone could make it to Russia to watch the games live, and that left people all over the world relying on the distribution and associated media rights within their region.
In Australia there was a lot of debate and discussion around the media rights for the World Cup and associated technical issues. The rights were held by Optus, a major telecommunications company, not a traditional television broadcaster.
Due to Australia’s anti-siphoning scheme, the public broadcaster SBS was able to broadcast Australia’s games, and the finals.
Optus has to get those costumers back. Costumes are very important, after all.
99.6% of Iceland’s population watched Iceland vs. Argentina? That means that 0.4% didn’t.
March 2018 population estimates had Iceland’s population as 350,710. So that is around 1,400 people didn’t.
Yet 30,000 Icelanders attended the World Cup. Go figure. They must have flown out after the game – Iceland’s first ever World Cup Finals game. Highly unlikely.
The link actually says “99.6% of people watching TV in the country were tuned in to Iceland’s first ever World Cup game against Argentina last weekend”, so it looks like a typo in Mumbrella’s article.
Thanks Josh, we’ve fixed that typo in the submitted article to reflect it was TV viewers, not the total population.
Cheers,
Paul Wallbank
News Editor
I really wish writers like MARC C-SCOTT would just spend 1 minute researching before they write articles.
“Due to Australia’s anti-siphoning scheme, the public broadcaster SBS was able to broadcast Australia’s games, and the finals.”
Not the case at all, SBS had 25 games, 1 match a day, for the entire cup before the shake-up happened during the tournament. This deal was not struck due to anti-siphoning, it was struck as a commercial deal between SBS (the broadcast rights holder) and Optus (the licensee). SBS retained the broadcast rights holder status, and is still in control of the relationship with FIFA.
A tiny bit of research would help you report facts correctly.