CAIRO: The Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU) is caught in a feud with Qatar-based Al Jazeera over the rights to broadcast of the African Cup of Nations matches which kicked off in Angola Sunday.
Last November, Al Jazeera acquired all the sports content, rights of broadcast and trademarks of the Arab Radio and Television (ART).
But in a recent statement, Osama El-Shiekh, head of the ERTU was adamant that no one – namely Al Jazeera – will twist Egypt’s arm, referring to what he believes to be “ridiculous terms of agreements imposed by the Qatari channel to allow the matches to be aired on Egyptian terrestrial television.
Al Jazeera is demanding that the ERTU pay $10 million to broadcast only 10 of the Egyptian national football team’s matches. The terms also prohibit Egypt from broadcasting re-runs of those matches and prohibit local commentators.
Gamal Haleel, head of Al Jazeera’s Egypt office, told independent daily, Al-Masry Al-Youm, that Al Jazeera is under constant attack from the Egyptian media so they can’t expect it to offer them broadcasting rights for minimal fees.
Viewers pay LE 120 in subscription fees to access Al Jazeera’s sports channels, but the price shot up to LE 400 to watch the African Cup of Nations matches.
Football fans are the ones paying the price of this feud. “The love of football is the one thing that unites us all so even now they are trying to deny us this simple pleasure, said Morsi Abdel Hamid, a porter in Heliopolis.
Not everyone will give in to the high price of watching the matches. There are “alternatives to paying high subscriptions, namely through an illegal connection (‘wasla’ in Arabic) to bypass encryptions.
Ahmed Osman, a driver who uses the wasla, says: “I can’t miss the football matches, and at the same time I can’t pay the subscription fees they are asking for so we have to find other ways to get access and the wasla is my only resort.
A survey by Arab Advisors Group published in 2008, showed that 75 percent of pay-TV viewers use illegal connections to access satellite channels at a low cost, resulting in more than 43.2 percent of Egyptian households having access to pay-TV.
Another pay-TV mogul, ART, is now under pressure from Egypt’s Consumer Protection Agency to refund subscribers who were duped through an ART ad campaign to subscribe to their sports channel only to find out that the rights have been sold to Al Jazeera.
