The crisis in the Brazilian pay-television industry is beginning to affect sports programming intensely. Fox Sports, which planned to enter the market in February 2003 concurrently with the launch of the Libertadores Cup soccer tournament, has put off its debut sine die. It blames the Brazilian Real?s plunge against the US Dollar, overall instability, and above all the risk of not being distributed. It was to have been introduced as a non-exclusive premium channel. Fox was negotiating with Neo TV, Sky, DirecTV, and Net Serviços, but distribution by the MSO with the largest subscriber base has looked unlikely since Globopar ran into financial difficulties and Net became bogged down in complex negotiations with creditors. Suitably for these challenging times, Fox offered pricing in local currency and even revenue sharing but none of this seems to have been sufficient to guarantee minimal distribution.
Economizing
Fox Sports isn?t the only source of bad news for subscribers in Brazil on the sports front. Other sports channels are set to economize in 2003, especially as far as acquiring rights is concerned. Broadcasters continue to allocate more and more time to soccer. For example, TV Globo will now broadcast soccer matches in five regions simultaneously instead of the usual two. This makes its sports coverage more attractive to local viewers and more competitive with pay TV, especially as the number of sports channels isn?t increasing.
