TrueVisions, Thailand's leading pay-TV operator, is vying for exclusive rights to the next season of the English Premier League (EPL) in a bid to strengthen its position as the top platform for sport.
Broadcasting giants are preparing for a bidding battle as the Premier League will put a selection of live football broadcasting packages up for sale and invite bids in the next two months.
The winner will have the rights to broadcast its matches starting from next year.
At least two "certain bidders", TrueVisions and its arch rival CTH, have voiced strong intent to purchase EPL broadcast rights for this season.
This year's auction may face uncertainty as a group of digital TV operators in Thailand are also expected to participate as they hope the EPL will be a most desired feature for their channel lineups and boost viewership.
Suphachai: Will fight to the end to win
"We will fight to the end to win the live broadcasting rights for the next EPL auction that will take place in the next two months," said Suphachai Chearavanont, president and chief executive of True Corporation, the parent firm of TrueVisions.
However, Mr Suphachai said the bidding price for the rights must be "acceptable and common value", as well as make sound business sense, otherwise he will give up on the bid.
"If the bidding price is deemed uneconomical and not worth the investment or beyond our business capability, we will seek other avenues of quality, appealing and customised content to offer better value for money than the EPL," he said.
Different investment-based programmes will also be applied in order to move its business forward, even without the EPL.
"Content is still king for the pay-TV subscription business," Mr Suphachai said.
The EPL is seen as the type of premium content that could help TrueVisions regain customers after it lost the previous bid to CTH.
But the EPL is not the only thing that people want to watch, Mr Suphachai said. It is also not the most valuable part of his company's content, he added.
"Without EPL last time, we continued with business as usual," he said.
However, Mr Suphachai said if TrueVisions won the rights to broadcast the EPL, the company would fully utilise the rights to sublicence rights to other broadcast operators, both locally and overseas.
In order to avoid a bidding war, Mr Suphachai also said TrueVisions welcomed everyone to enter collective bargaining negotiations in order to jointly participate with the company to bid for the EPL rights.
CTH won the broadcast rights for the league's 2013-15 season in what the industry termed "the incredibly highest bid price offered". The strategic move by CTH aimed to create a shortcut to become the ruling pay-TV broadcaster and overtake market leader TrueVisions.
CTH's bid was said to exceed 10 billion baht — more than double the value of the EPL contract in the previous three-season cycle.
TrueVisions won the EPL broadcast rights in a direct bid for the first time in 2007 after receiving a sublicence for its pay-TV system from ESPN Star Sports.
Anuparb Thiralap, a telecommunications academic, said the way the EPL auction was set-up meant that local broadcasters were likely to face higher costs for broadcasting live matches.
The large number of bidders in Thailand has attracted criticism from industry veterans who argue that intense competition will only generate a huge windfall for the Premier League.
It will also immediately trigger an increase in the amount spent on the exclusive broadcasting rights and Thailand will not gain anything from this competition.
Pay-TV and digital and satellite TV provide excellent examples of how difficult it is to survive when technology is changing rapidly, said an industry analyst, who asked not to be named.
An increasing population of so called "cord-never" — those who never signed up for pay-TV subscriptions and don't intend to — are affecting traditional TV business models as more consumers turn to streaming services and video content, especially among the younger demographic.
Internet-based services are the single biggest threat to the traditional cable and digital TV businesses, with many seeing their number of subscribers expanding as the client base for traditional cable TV slowly weakens, said the analyst.