Arena Sports Rights and Marketing

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Arena Sportrechte and Marketing GmbH

logo
legal form GmbH
founding 2005
resolution September 30, 2010
Seat Cologne , Germany
management
  • Herbert Leifker
Number of employees 5 (2010)
sales 9 million euros (2010)
Branch Pay TV

The Arena sports rights and marketing GmbH was a German media company, which until August 2007 mainly the same pay-TV program Arena has operated. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of the cable operator Unitymedia . Operations ceased on September 30, 2010.

Arena became famous at the end of 2005 when it was awarded the audio-visual exploitation rights of the Bundesliga for the years 2006 to 2009 in a bidding process by the DFL under the direction of Parm Sandhu . One year later, the parent company Unitymedia passed on the exploitation rights for the live broadcast of the Bundesliga to Premiere in the form of a sub-license due to antitrust and marketing law obstacles . Arena no longer acted as a TV broadcaster, but on June 30, 2008 it was still behind Premiere, the second largest satellite platform in Germany with 324,000 subscribers. In addition, Arena still held the broadcasting rights for the entire 2008/2009 Bundesliga season .

Economic development

In order to be able to refinance the costs of 220 million euros for the television rights to the first and second Bundesliga as well as all other costs (for further sports rights, technology, personnel, advertising), Arena would have needed 2.5 million subscribers . In mid-2007, however, the station only had 1.1 million paying customers, which meant huge losses.

In the nine months from July 2006 to March 2007 alone, the station made a loss of 189 million euros, expenses of 316 million euros were offset by income of just 127 million euros. Overall, the losses from the first year of reporting from the Bundesliga added up to around 250 million euros.

Therefore, the Bundesliga rights were passed on to Premiere in mid-2007. For this, Arena received a total of 200 million euros (100 million euros per season) as well as a share package of 17% in Premiere AG worth 300 million euros. Arena passed the rights on to Premiere as a sub-license , thus remaining a contractual partner of the Bundesliga until the end of the contract in 2009 and continued to pay 220 million euros per year to the clubs of the two national leagues.

Football Bundesliga

The pay TV channel Arena Bundesliga broadcast all 612 games of the first and second Bundesliga live in the 2006/2007 season . The contract with the DFL ran for three years until July 2009, the rights were sold on to competitor Premiere as a sub-license at the beginning of the 2007/2008 season.

The fee-based offering from Arena could be received across the board via satellite and cable. The monthly fee for the pay TV service was 15 euros for cable customers and 20 euros for satellite customers. Minimum terms of between 12 and 24 months meant that payments also had to be made during the winter and summer breaks without play. Commercials were shown before and after the games as well as during the half-time break.

Despite lower subscription prices, Arena was only able to achieve a fraction of its subscriber targets. When the Bundesliga rights could be bought in December 2005, Arena gave six million subscription customers as a target; In mid-2007 there were only 1.1 million subscription customers.

Since Arena had not only sold the Bundesliga rights to Premiere, but also all other rights (for example the Spanish Primera División ), the station was finally wound up in the second half of 2007; only the “arenaSAT” satellite platform continued to exist until September 30, 2010.

Other football rights

In August 2006, the station bought the rights to the Spanish Primera División and the Spanish Cup competition Copa del Rey for three years. In addition, 80 Italian Serie A games were broadcast live in the 2006/2007 season .

Starting with the 2007/2008 season, Arena also planned to broadcast around 100 live English Premier League matches and all 380 matches in the summary. Arena had exclusive rights to numerous Premier League games outside of the weekends - in "English weeks" and on public holidays.

In addition, Arena acquired other football rights such as the rights to the Copa América 2007 and the English Carling Cup . In order to bridge the summer break of 2007, games from a friendship tournament in Dubai , in which FC Bayern Munich participated, were shown.

After the end of Arena, the rights to Premiere were sublicensed and the in-house production of the reporting was discontinued. However, the arenaSAT satellite platform still held the broadcasting rights for the entire 2008/2009 Bundesliga season.

Further rights

On September 27, 2006, Arena announced the acquisition of exclusive live exploitation rights for the 2006 World Volleyball Championship (men and women) in Japan.

In order to be able to show live sport during the winter break, Arena acquired rights to the bobsleigh and skeleton World Cup as well as the rights to the World Championship in St. Moritz . Ron Ringguth, known from the Eurosport program, was the commentator for the competitions .

Arena expanded its program from February 10, 2007 with boxing events on the US broadcaster HBO . Among them were title fights in the highest weight classes.

As of April 16, 2007, Arena broadcast the America's Cup for up to four hours a day .

Bundesliga on free TV

On August 12, 2006, Arena broadcast the first matchday of the 2006/07 soccer Bundesliga season live in a conference call on Sat.1 in order to win new subscribers for the pay TV service from Arena. However, the ratings remained below expectations, with only 2.6 million viewers interested in the broadcast. Sat.1 broadcast advertising before and between the games.

Former moderators and commentators

ArenaSAT

In addition, from August 2007 to September 30, 2010, arenaSAT offered additional satellite programs under arenaSAT. arenaSAT FAMILY had 22 channels on the topic of documentation and entertainment for the family (57,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2009). Sender (as of September 2008):

Individual evidence

  1. a b Publication in the electronic Federal Gazette
  2. Arena: losses with Bundesliga
  3. Expensive grant business
  4. Premiere has to pay dearly for the Bundesliga ( Memento from October 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  5. Arena hopes to have at least six million customers
  6. Little interest in arena conference ( Memento from May 9, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  7. Unitymedia loses customers, but increases profit ( Memento from March 23, 2010 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

www.arena.tv
(last version in the web archive from February 8, 2012)