Recently, the Pay-per-view Television Association (VnpayTV) recommended that the Ministry of Information and Communications not grant Facebook a license to broadcast Premier League football tournaments if it does not meet the requirements for censorship, editing, and translating Vietnamese content.
This proposal was made after the international press reported that Facebook had reached an agreement to broadcast the Premier League live on its social networking platform in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam from next season.
Accordingly, FacebookFB (NASDAQ) spent 200 million pounds, equivalent to about 264 million USD to acquire the rights to broadcast the Premier League for 3 consecutive seasons from 2019-2020 in 4 Southeast Asian countries: Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.
This is not the time Facebook spends money to buy the rights to broadcast sports tournaments.
In August 2016, the company spent money to buy royalties for tournaments from football to basketball, bong da and other sports, starting with the charity match between Manchester United and Everton.
In 2017, Facebook successfully acquired the copyright of 20 matches within the framework of the top professional league in the US Major League Baseball (MLB). The matches are broadcast free of charge to all Facebook users in the US. The copyright value was not disclosed by both parties.
By 2018, Facebook will continue to have exclusive rights to 25 matches of MLB 2018 with a price predicted by experts at 30-35 million USD.
The technology company also partnered with Fox to broadcast the UEFA Champions League and the Spanish football tournament with Univision. In addition, every week, Facebook also exclusively broadcasts an event of WWE - a very popular performer tournament in the US.
And not only Facebook, technology giants like Amazon and Google are also racing to own the copyright, to exclusively broadcast live many major sporting tournaments around the world.
In the UK, Amazon will exclusively broadcast 20 Premier League games in three seasons from next year. This is not a good thing for TV stations like Sky or BT that have dominated the copyright of sports tournaments for many years.
Previously, Jeff Bezos' company also surpassed Sky to win the exclusive broadcasting rights of the ATP World Tour tennis tournament.
Amazon also spent about $40 million to exclusively broadcast the US Open tennis tournament in the UK for 5 years.
Currently, Google's Youtube also owns the broadcasting rights of some packages at the US professional football tournament with the Seattle Sounders and Los Angeles FC - a team with many stars who have been competing with David Beckham, Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
