RadioWorks has been appointed by One Media Management to sell advertising space within their Barclays Premier League Football commentary which is being broadcast Live across radio stations in China.
As live television coverage in China can now only be obtained through a newly-launched, Canton based Pay-Per-View TV network, the audience potential for radio is immense (400,000,000 people watched the recent Manchester Utd v Arsenal match and a large proportion were in the Far-East).
The termination of the no-cost TV coverage, which the Chinese Premier League audience have enjoyed for years, has caused uproar amongst the huge Chinese fan base and an online survey organized by sina.com, the biggest internet portal in China, shows that 62% of the audience regard this as ‘the end of the world’.
The radio market in China has been developing rapidly in recent years. There are ten radio stations in China whose annual revenue exceeds RMB 1 billion (equivalent to 100 million pounds). By the year 2005, there were more than 500 million radios in China.