Increases for fifth consecutive yearInternational Sportsworld Communicators, the media and commercial rights holders for the World Rally Championship, has announced the latest TV audience statistics and data, illustrating that the cumulative global television audience of
the WRC has increased 46% since 2002, from 554 million to 807 million, reaching almost every country in the world.
The 2006 season saw a total number of dedicated WRC broadcasts of 8,522, an increase of 27% since 2005, equating to a total of 4,544 hours of coverage worldwide, an increase of 155% since 2002.
Despite tough competition in the global TV marketplace, WRC's portfolio of broadcasters continued to grow last year and landmark agreements were concluded with pan-regional cable and satellite broadcasters
in Asia (ESPN Star Sports), Latin America (ESPN), the Middle East (Al Jazeera), Africa (Supersport) and Europe (Eurosport). Most significantly most of these agreements are multi-year contracts which underpin the future success of the WRC TV programming and provide an excellent base from which to grow the sport and develop the WRC brand on a global basis.
Key terrestrial channels, such as ITV in the UK, France TV, TVE Spain, RTL Germany, YLE Finland and RTR Russia, also renewed agreements, which is testament to the growing momentum of WRC with many of them actually increasing the amount of coverage. This is proven by three of the key European markets which showed significant increases in their audience figures for 2006, with France increasing by 10%, Germany by 69% and Spain by 56% compared to the year before.
TV agreements with new broadcasters in new territories were also secured for the 2006 season, such as RTE Ireland, various terrestrial networks in Belgium, Sport TV Portugal, MMS Ukraine and CTV Belarus.
Source WRC
