Indovision, the country’s largest pay - TV provider, completed a surprising late comeback to emerge as the winner of non-exclusive broadcast rights for the English Premier League, a company official said. Owned by PT MNC Skyvision, Indovision was awarded the broadcast rights on Sunday and began airing matches that night, after ending a partnership with Telkomvision just the day before. “Indovision was the first pay-TV provider to secure the rights,” Arya Mahendra, the company’s corporate secretary, said on Monday. “We secured full coverage of about 370 matches.” Indovision had previously said it was not even interested in bidding for the right to broadcast England’s top-flight football league, which is hugely popular in Indonesia and across Asia. The company currently has about 480,000 subscribers. “We hope this particular program will help us gain 50,000 to 100,000 new subscribers in the next three months,” Arya said, adding that he expected football fans, bars and restaurants to rush to subscribe. Indovision’s win came as a surprise. On Friday, Arya had maintained that Indovision and Telkomvision’s owner, PT Indonusa Telemedia, would form a consortium to split costs and negotiate an agreement with the joint owners of the Premier League rights, ESPNStar Sports and Astro All Asia Networks. The two providers were set to negotiate through the Indonesian Multimedia Providers Association (APMI), a grouping of 17 media companies. But a source close to the deal told the Jakarta Globe that ESPNStar threatened to call off the talks if APMI remained the designated negotiator, saying the association was not a business entity. The source also said ESPNStar didn’t want to negotiate with a consortium. “Both Telkomvision and Indovision finally parted ways on Saturday [and Indovision] re-bid $6 million for broadcast rights on their own to ESPNStar,” the source said, adding that ESPNStar has banned Indovision from sharing broadcasts of matches with other providers. Just days ago it seemed Telkomvision had locked down the rights. President director Rahadi Arsyad said a fortnight ago that it had reached an unofficial agreement to buy the non-exclusive broadcast rights and was waiting to sign a contract. It’s unclear whether the company or another Indonesian broadcaster will also attempt to buy the non-exclusive broadcast rights. ESPNStar Sports usually sells exclusive rights to broadcast Premier League matches. Last year, pay-TV provider Aora paid $25 million for exclusive rights. Gaby Motuloh, Aora’s corporate secretary, declined to say whether Aora would be interested in extending its existing contract, but it did not air any matches on Saturday.
