| MUMBAI:
Soccer's governing body Fifa is expecting to earn $2.7 billion on television rights
to broadcast the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Earlier,
ESPN Star Sports (ESS) had acquired the India television rights for the games
at $40 million. Fifa
will also broadcast the World Cup games to hundreds of millions of mobile phones
worldwide, and has entered into special agreements with African TV networks across
the continent for the same. Said
Fifa TV director Niclas Ericson, "We have entered an agreement with the African
Union of Broadcasters to place the TV rights in 41 sub-Saharan countries before
the end of 2009. "The
dream would be for an African team to reach the final, which would boost TV viewership,"
he added. India,
China participation key to grow TV viewership: Fifa
is not expecting the global television audience for next year's World Cup in South
Africa to increase. According to Ericson, the only way an increased audience could
be achieved was through countries with large populations such as India, China,
and Indonesia.
Ericson said that the cumulative global audience for the 2006 event was 26.3 billion,
a figure which should also be achieved for the South Africa tournament. "It
should be more or less similar for 2010. We do expect record figures in Africa,
where there will be much more free TV coverage in general," Ericson said.
"But
the problem with these figures is that many countries do not
have audited numbers and it is therefore difficult to predict
any significant increase or decrease. We do hope the audiences
will grow a little bit in every country," he explained.
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