UEFA May Face Compensation Claims for Match Broadcast Glitches

NYON, June 26: The BBC and
ZDF are among the broadcasters said to be considering filing formal complaints
with UEFA after a power outage disrupted the broadcast of last night’s Euro
2008 semi-final match between Germany and Turkey.

Almost 20 minutes of last
night’s gripping match, watched by a reported 30 million viewers in Germany
alone, went unaired in the second half, including Miroslav Klose’s goal that
put Germany ahead, followed by Turkey’s equalizer. The feed returned in time
for Germany’s final 3-2 winning goal, before going down again at the end of the
match. The disruptions were blamed on storms in Austria that knocked out power
at the International Broadcast Center (IBC) in Vienna, which was transmitting
the feed to broadcasters worldwide. The only broadcasters said to be unaffected
were Swiss Television, broadcasting directly from the pitch in Basel, and Al
Jazeera, which had its own broadcast center on site. During the outages, ESPN in
the U.S. switched to shots of fans congregated in Basel and in-studio
commentary. ZDF, meanwhile, picked up the Swiss Television coverage, while the
BBC offered up audio coverage from Radio 5. The BBC is said to have received
more than 150 complaints about the disruptions.

At a press conference this
morning in Vienna, UEFA Media Technologies’ CEO, Alexandre Fourtoy, noted that
although IBC switched to a backup generator after the outage, it took several
minutes for the system to reboot. “The protection system has been defective in
detecting the cuts, to switch to the back-up power. You should know that we
have selected the best providers to build-up our IBC and the power
system—the providers which have built up the IBC and the power system for
the World Cup 2006—and this power has been fully tested according to
industry procedure before the event and it was working perfectly well up until
yesterday.”

Fourtoy apologized for the
interruptions and noted that UEFA is providing all Euro 2008 broadcast partners
with a complete feed for retransmission.

Nonetheless, Nikolaus
Brender, ZDF's editor-in-chief, told Der Spiegel: "Our viewer numbers were negatively
affected" by the blackout. "By losing the picture, we missed having
the highest viewer numbers ever in Germany. Many viewers were disappointed. We
will certainly be talking to UEFA about this." Reports indicate that ZDF
and ARD shelled out 115 million euros for the rights to the football
tournament. UEFA is said to have reaped a total of 800 million euros in
broadcast-rights revenues from 180 countries.

UEFA says it is taking
precautions for tonight’s semi-final between Russia and Spain, and for Sunday’s
final. “We have switched the power of the IBC to the fully independent
generator power, which has also a back up on its own, because what we want to
do is to avoid any external factor affecting the power and therefore the
transmission of the signal.”

—By Mansha Daswani