Unspun and the adorable wife was talking about watching the Olympics on TV when we realized that there’s been very little coverage about which station would be carrying the Olympic broadcast in Indonesia.
Stranger still is when they read the newspapers and saw an advertisement of seemingly the only TV station offering live Olympic coverage in Indonesia. It was strange because the advertisement had all the hallmarks of a rush job. The headline on the ad promised “Beijing Olympics LIVE 4 channels” only on the new Pay TV of PT Karyamegah Adijaya.
There was no brand to the pay TV channel and the only reference to who was behind this pay TV was the name PT Karyamegah Adijaya and a phone number. No website. Nothing else save the subscription rates.
If you go into the internet then Karyamegah Adijaya is apparently Citra TV.
If this is the case then why isn’;t the company using the Citra TV name and logo? And how did Citra TV manage to get the exclusive rights of the Olympics when the established pay TV operators couldn’t?
Finally one other question that needs to be answered is this: what is the Press doing about informing us about the maneuverings behind the fight for the rights to the Olympics, as surely there must be one.
Of is this too much to ask from the Fifth Estate, whose job is to educate and inform us apart from entertaining us to their endless inane stories?
Can someone please enlighten the rest of us?
Fifth estate? Did you mean fourth estate?
@Ikram: You are right. I got my estates jumbled up. Fourth it is. Thanks for pointing this out.
I’m surprised you missed the news: it’s TVRI. They signed with ABU on July 15th, as the Jakarta Post reported:
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/07/15/tvri-air-beijing-olympics-live-free.html
For Pay TV, yes it’s Karya Megah, a new channel. I’m not sure what connection the company has to Citra TV though. Again, this was reported by the press. Bisnis Indonesia, to be exact:
http://www.bisnis.com/servlet/page?_pageid=127&_dad=portal30&_schema=PORTAL30&vnw_lang_id=1&ptopik=ENG&cdate=05-AUG-2008&inw_id=617542
@Ari: Mea culpa. Unspun ‘s been too busy with the family thing and missed out on some of the coverage. Thanks for pointing it out.
Unspun’s sources say that PT Karyamegah will be launching itself as Citra TV complete with logos, brandnames and dancing girls in the beginning of next year.
Your welcome, Unspun.
hey i have kabelvision/digital one/first media satellite tv put in, and we get the broadcast from tvri but its not of the olympics, but rather the broadcast of eurosport news. there is a message saying onthe screen they cannot broadcast the olympics… how am i supposed to watch it? do i have to pay for it or is there some other way to do it?
@Earl: It appears that all the pay TV stations cannot carry the TVRI broadcast on the Olympics. Not very nice of them to tell us before hand, but Unspun’s solution is to buy an antennae and tune into TVRI. That, or fork out Rp1.5 million to subscribe to PT Karyamegah Adjaya and their four channels of Olympic coverage.