PAPUA New Guinea’s newest television station – Click Pacific – has been awarded rights to broadcast several FIFA world soccer body events including the soccer World Cup in Brazil next year.
Click Pacific Ltd was recently granted pay and free-to-air TV licences by the country’s licensing body, the National Information and Communications Technology Authority (NICTA).
The television company was formed in February this year and is the brainchild of a group of PNG investors and Mai TV Fiji founder Richard Broadbridge.
The company will announce its own launching date later and is currently focusing on ensuring as many people as possible across the Pacific Islands get to watch the prestigious sporting event live from Brazil.
The company said its television service would make an announcement shortly.
Click Pacific was awarded sole television rights to FIFA TV content between Dec 2013 and July 2014 by rights holder MP&Silva.
Broadbridge said: “We are delighted that after a thorough tender process, we were awarded these rights. For a start-up PNG company, this goes a long way towards stamping PNG’s mark as a major player in content acquisition and sales.”
The television station has been granted the right to sublicense and broadcast several FIFA events in 14 Pacific Island territories. These include the FIFA beach soccer World Cup in Tahiti this December, the Under-17 World Cup, Under-17 Women’s World Cup, Under-20 Women’s World Cup plus the soccer World Cup next June.
MP&Silva is an international media rights company based in London which manages sports TV rights for a range of international sporting events and distributes around 10,000 hours of programming to some 500 broadcasters.