MIO TV - Singapore Sole Broadcaster

SINGTEL'S mio TV has signed a slew of football tournament broadcast rights deals on a non-exclusive basis, which ironically means that most of them cannot be watched anywhere else.

The pay-TV operator said yesterday that it had clinched the rights to air the English FA Cup, Italian Serie A, French Ligue 1, England International Home Games, Italy International Home Games, Capital One Cup - formerly known as the Carling Cup - and the Npower Championship.

As all these tournaments were signed on a non-exclusive basis, mio TV has avoided invoking the cross-carriage law which makes a pay-TV operator share its exclusive content with a competitor upon request.

When contacted, StarHub confirmed that it does not carry the tournaments that mio TV will be airing. The French Ligue 1 matches are a slight exception, as some of them are shown on one of StarHub's French language channels, but only in French.

mio TV also said yesterday that it will carry the 2014 FIFA World Cup Qualifiers. When contacted, StarHub said that it has the broadcast rights of "a selection of World Cup 2014 qualifiers". If either England or Italy is playing in the qualifier, StarHub will be airing only the team's "away" matches.

"In light of rapidly rising content costs, our priority is to acquire content sensibly to ensure good value for our customers . . . We assure our customers that sport content remains an important part of our content line-up and we are always looking to add quality sport content to our programming," StarHub said.

While the FA Cup tournament's first qualifying round aired this morning, mio TV will start airing the FA Cup from the second qualifying round onwards, on Sept 21.

It is not clear if this is the result of a deal done at the eleventh hour. As far back as July, content distributor MP & Silva told the media that "Singapore is the only country in Asia where we have not received concrete offers". MP & Silva manages the content rights for all the tournaments that mio TV said it had won yesterday.