On Wednesday, subscribers turned on their television sets to find that the channels showing the World Cup soccer had been blocked.
People were outraged and started to flood the radio stations, newspapers and The Cable with complaints.
The Cable said it was not their fault and they were simply complying with a cease and desist order from ZIZ’s lawyers.
Subscribers did not care about law documents and other legal jargons. They wanted to see their football.
Some subscribers turned to ZIZ to watch the football, and found that the channel was showing live cricket action.
There is nothing wrong with ZIZ showing the cricket. The problem is the arrogance that ZIZ displayed in deciding that residents of the Federation should not watch live football action, but wait until ZIZ was ready to show the matches, which would be after the matches are over and people know the score.
We live in an era of readily available information, who is going to wait on ZIZ to re-broadcast anything?
The Cable had offered to take the feed ZIZ was receiving and broadcast the matches on one of the stations that was blocked out. ZIZ had said ‘no’ to this.
The Cable’s equipment was already set up and it would have taken minutes for subscribers to see the matches live with the ZIZ logos and commercials. ZIZ had said no to this.
Anyway, pretty soon subscribers began calling ZIZ’s advertisers, which quickly led to the management of ZIZ coming to their senses.
Regardless of this, many people have complained that ZIZ’s feed of the matches are dark and of low quality.
Somehow ZIZ has set a precedent where The Cable can be ordered to black out channels that are in competition with ZIZ, and that is chilling. Subscribers are paying a fixed cost for those channels.
Can ZIZ make similar arrangements with the NBA, NFL and MLB?
