World Cup - Asian TV
The first World Cup to be held in Asia guarantees a massive TV audience in Asia itself, with none of the unsocial viewing hours that armchair fans in Europe and the Americas will need to endure. However, the high cost of the coverage will mean some cash-strapped viewers without access to pay-per-view TV look likely to miss out.
Germany's KirchMedia, which owns the worldwide television
and radio broadcast
rights to the 2002 and 2006 World Cups, has been busy cutting deals with
Asian TV companies to televise the event. Most Asian broadcasters will
pass on these costs to their viewers.
In Japan, free-to-air channels including state broadcaster NHK, and the Asahi and Yomiuri commercial networks will show only 40 of the 64 games.
SkyPerfecTV will air all the matches on its satellite channels but at present the company has less than 3 million subscribers out of a potential audience in Japan of 125 million.
In Korea the three major broadcasters, Korean Broadcasting System, Seoul Broadcasting System and Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation have created a single consortium to show all the action at no extra cost.
In China state broadcaster China Central Television has yet to finalize a deal with Kirch which could see the potentially huge domestic audience missing out on their team's first ever World Cup. Likewise in Malaysia where the satellite broadcaster Astro has yet to confirm it will be airing the tournament at all.
Football-mad Thais and Vietnamese will both enjoy the football-fest for free with all the games shown live and without commercial breaks on yet to be decided channels in Thailand and state broadcaster Vietnam Television also broadcasting all the games live and free-to-air.
