ESPN and Star Sports are beaming 165 live games and more than 1,000 hours of EPL programming, as well as a line-up of support news programming on a daily basis, with predictions, information and pre-and post-game analysis.
"We've moved from merely broadcasting sports events to producing our own programming around these events and leveraging on our online products to get advertisers across to diverse audiences," said Greg Hayes, senior vice-president of ESS' advertising sales and multimedia ventures.
Nokia will be running an SMS contest open to mobile phone users in eight markets, including Hong Kong, Singapore, China, India and Brunei to vote for the 'Man of the Match' for the weekend games, as well as the EPL online contests on Football Focus and Here We Go programmes. "This sponsorship gives us a great opportunity to communicate the benefits of new technologies such as Java and XHTML to consumers and provides a fun and interactive platform for us to bring the world of techno-tainment to diverse audiences in the region who enjoy watching EPL," said Pasi Jarvenpaa, director, marketing services, Nokia Mobile Phones, Asia-Pacific.
Castrol is dangling the prize of a David Beckham-autographed football jersey to stimulate viewership for sports channels' news and analysis programmes and in the Castrol Goal of the week contests.
The Castrol brand is all about winning, passion and excitement, and the team was searching for a media opportunity to help us drive these values with our core target audience. Castrol saw the perfect fit with the English Premier League target across Asia," said A S Ramchander, Castrol's marketing director.
The broadcast of EPL on ESS is sponsored by Tiger Beer and Toshiba. ESPN has produced peoplemeter data to show that a single EPL match delivers 25 per cent more viewers than all cable news channels combined.
"While Asia's sizeable out-of-home audience is not measured by in-home peoplemeter measurements, research indicates that 64 per cent watch the EPL outside their homes every week.