CJ ENM, which was selected as the preferred bidder for the right to broadcast new media (wireless) in professional baseball between 2024 and 2026, beat its rival company under two unexpected conditions. First of all, it offered a huge amount of more than 40 billion won per year, overwhelming the rival company in the “money game.” And it has decided to allow full reuse of videos that broadcast in professional baseball.
The Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) announced on the 8th that it will conduct detailed negotiations by selecting CJ ENM as the preferred bidder for the KBO’s wired and wireless broadcasting rights project from 2024 to 2026. CJ ENM, a consortium of telecommunications and portals (Naver, SK Telecom, LG Uplus, Africa TV) and Aikla (SPOTV) participated in the bidding, and CJ ENM became the final winner after KBO’s evaluation.
KBO did not disclose the evaluation method regarding this bid. For reference, 60% of price evaluation and 40% of technical evaluation were reflected in the 2019 bid.
The higher the score in the price evaluation, the more likely it is to be selected as the preferred bidder for the wired and wireless broadcasting rights project. The telecommunications and portal consortium (Naver, Daum, SK Broadband, LG Uplus, and KT), which became the winner five years ago, received 60 points in the price evaluation by offering 110 billion won (average 22 billion won per year), the highest amount in Korean professional sports history.
This time, CJ ENM spent 40 billion won (39 million U.S. dollars) in bidding, overwhelming the telecom and portal consortium and Aikla, which offered 20 billion won (20 million dollars) per year and 30 billion won (29 million dollars), respectively. The deal is twice as large as the previous one. In addition, CJ ENM took out another winning move. It allows fans to freely write professional baseball videos on social networking sites and YouTube.
For the previous five years, professional baseball video sources have not been available to anyone. The telecommunications and portal consortium, which has the right to broadcast wired and wireless communications, was also a copyright holder related to professional baseball video and cracked down on its unauthorized use. He also showed a strong attitude to take legal action if it was violated.
Even the club had to sign a separate contract to use the video of the game, and even videos or gifs (short for moving pictures) posted by fans for reasons other than commercial purposes were not allowed. 메이저 토토사이트
There is nothing wrong with the copyright holder’s strong punishment for copyright infringement as he paid a high price to obtain business rights, but the baseball community and baseball fans were dissatisfied with considering everything as illegal video regardless of profitability.
Players had a similar view. Before moving to the Major League, Lee Jung-hoo of the San Francisco Giants attended the KBO League Media Day 2022 and said, “Baseball is too long even to me. I hope people who are not familiar with baseball will have a chance to experience it more easily,” adding, “I really don’t understand (the ban on gifs).”
For this reason, the opening and recycling of baseball videos was inevitably an important evaluation criterion in the process of selecting preferred negotiators for the wired and wireless broadcasting rights project. Unlike its competitors, CJ ENM received positive reviews for promising to open videos such as highlights and clip services, excluding real-time broadcasts.
If CJ ENM is confirmed as the final wired and wireless broadcasting rights operator after detailed negotiations with KBO in the future, fans will be able to freely process baseball video sources from this year to create secondary creations or use them on YouTube.
