By Kwon Mee-yoo
Staff reporter
The 2010 World Cup is just around the corner, but major broadcasting stations are still fighting over the broadcasting rights of the games.
One day after SBS, the nation’s third largest broadcaster, announced that the network is going to broadcast the South Africa World Cup unilaterally, KBS and MBC immediately slammed SBS for breaking ongoing negotiations over joint broadcasting and said they will take legal action against the company.
KBS called SBS’ decision “regrettable” and said the latter did not want to broadcast together in the first place. MBC said it will file both criminal and civil suits against SBS and its Chairman Yoon Se-young and other executives for interfering with business.
“We will sue SBS for impeding our business, as they broke an agreement to jointly negotiate for the World Cup broadcasting rights in 2006,” MBC spokesperson Choi Gi-hwa said.
The broadcaster claimed that SBS knew the bid price of the joint team and added a premium in a separate bid to win the rights.
“We conceded to SBS in the World Cup broadcasting negotiations, but it requested 40 billion won ($37 million) excluding popular games such as South Korea, North Korea, the opening and final matches to share the rights,” Choi said.
KBS said it will sue SBS, “for its illegal gaining of the broadcasting rights.”
However, SBS said they bought the sole right to screen the soccer games from FIFA and the FIFA did not want a resale of the rights within Korea. “That’s FIFA’s stance and we conveyed it to the Korea Communications Commission,” Huh In-koo, head of SBS Sports, said.
SBS will provide two-minute clips per game, a total of some six-minute clips everyday to the other broadcasters everyday for news stories. KBS and MBC might not be able to cover the games on-site as FIFA might not allow SBS to share their reporter cards.