London — So much attention has been focused on the Pay TV battle for the Premiership rights that it would be easy to miss the development of Setanta Africa's Free To Air coverage through its partner stations on the continent. This week Russell Southwood talks to Setanta Africa's founder Barry Lambert and to Nada Anderson of Sports TV Uganda, one of its partner stations.

Setanta Africa has survived the very public collapse of Setanta UK because it is part of Setanta's separate parent company based in Ireland. Barry Lambert launched LIM Africa in 2002 after leaving TV Africa, of which he was both a founder and shareholder. It was created to distribute specialised feed on an ad hoc basis from FIFA, the FA and UEFA among others.

He supplied terrestrial broadcasters via satellite with sponsorship attached. They paid nominal fees for it and integrated local programming around it at source. It really took off with the World Cup when 28 countries took the content.

Lambert knew two of the Irish founders of Setanta so in 2005 he said to them: do you want a partner in Africa? They said "yes" and this became the joint venture that is Setanta Africa. They had the administrative and legal knowledge of buying rights and already possessed the rights for things like the live rights for the Scottish Premier League and World title fights in boxing.

In addition, Setanta was already producing magazine programmes for some of the key clubs in the English Premier League like Spurs, Arsenal and Manchester City and were able to show Premier League games 24 hours after they had occurred. This became the Big Match Opportunity which was shown at 7pm either on Sunday or Monday.

According to Lambert, the aim of the business is to grow it:"We said to ourselves whatever we get from the business, we will put back into rights and that's exactly what's happened over the last two years. We'll do that until we can afford the big ticket events and that will probably take is 3-4 years."

"So we're not a must have channel but a nice to have channel. Those going over to DTT will need our kind of sports channel. It's also fantastic for people like Zuku (Wananchi, Kenya's IP-TV provider). We've got a turnover of US$2 million and we know it will grow. We went into the black after GTV and individually found a new rate for everyone except Mauritius who are at the edge of the satellite footprints but we'll solve that one soon."

It works with a wide range of affiliate broadcasters in Africa including Sports TV Uganda (see below) and Metro TV in Ghana.

He can see the merits of the bid for the Pay TV rights by Hi-TV's Toyin Subair and the consortium he is putting together but also knows the difficulties that will be involved in making it work:"It gives an opportunity for African countries to create their own destinies but the decision will be made by the rights holders."

Sports TV Uganda seizes a significant chunk of audience thirsty for sports coverage

Nada Anderson started in Uganda by running her advertising agency Star Leo which she launched in May 1998. She had a fine art background so decided initially to create a design business which very quickly became an advertising agency.

Before Euro 2000 she met Barry Lambert who was then working for TV Africa while she was doing sales for Ugandan Television. She had acquired the marketing and management rights for Euro 2000 and was beginning to get a taste for the broadcast business. This expanded with the World Cup:"We did the broadcast rights in Guinea and Guinea Bissau and became a sort of sales agent." However when TV5 and LC2 bought the Cup of African Nations, it was a bit of a shock:"Barry's plan B was LIM Africa where he could something differently and would sell things other than the World and the Premier League."

Lambert encouraged Nada Anderson to go and see UBC and see whether they would be interested in setting up a TV sports channel with them:"We had meetings and meetings and more meetings. One time they annoyed me so much I said to myself I might as well set this up on my own." The problem was that UBC had taken the World Cup rights in 2006 but a combination of lack of sales experience and the Ptresidential elections meant that it got its fingers burnt. So it was extremely cautious and this became Anderson's opportunity. The channel started in July 2008 so is celebrating its one year anniversary.

Sports TV Uganda gets a channel of content over satellite from Setanta for Free To Air distribution and is the broadcast partner to Setanta Africa in Uganda. It broadcasts the content on to its audiences through rented terrestrial transmitter capacity that covers a 150 kilometre radius around the capital Kampala. It also does a number of locally produced programmes and its own station ident. The main fixed costs are for rights, transmission and licensing. Beyond that, there are very few variable costs.

It has recently become one of the channels surveyed by Steadman and it will soon have data showing audiences. However, from two surveys it conducted itself, 75% of the audiences know about the channel and 70% have watched it at some time. It is a younger crowd and has a lot of women amongst it. The two samples for the survey were 200 and 300 and in the second one it was third in terms of audience share after NTV and WBS.

Anderson says that the station reaches 1.5 million people a day at some point. She points to the Orange Carnival Party promotion it did to demonstrate that there are audiences out there. It started the promotion for free tickets at 10.40 and all of the tickets were gone by noon.

Current advertisers include mobile operators Orange and Zain, a local company Bella Wine and SMS One, a local SMS service provider. A 30 second spot costs US$110, 25% of the cost of advertising with national broadcasters:"Local ad agencies use the Steadman survey to assess channel performance so once we're part of that, things will continue to get better." It has recently done a special sales promotion for the supermarket chain Uchumi and it saw a very direct impact on its sales in the process. It can also produce ads very cheaply for clients who not have had previous experience of using television advertising.

If it can get Sports TV Uganda right, Anderson is interested in looking at a French language version as there are a number of francophone countries where the rights are still available and Setanta has no French language service.

If Sports TV Uganda can make a Free To Air Sports channel commercially successful, it will be a portent of the future shape of African broadcasting.