Live coverage of at least one J.League fixture per match week will be available on the Japanese professional football league’s international YouTube channel in the Middle East and North Africa, plus selected countries in Asia.
The streaming on the channel, which is managed by the sports video news agency SNTV, will begin tomorrow as Vissel Kobe face Hokkaido Consadole Sapporo.
Along with the Mena region, the live streaming will be available in the Indian subcontinent, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam.
The international YouTube channel was launched earlier this year after SNTV, a joint venture between IMG and the Associated Press, was appointed to manage the channel. A live chat function and statistics will be provided by the channel team during the coverage of the top-tier J1 League matches.
Dentsu, the Japanese advertising agency heavily involved in sports marketing, holds the international distribution rights to all territories outside of China to the J.League after acquiring the rights in October 2019. The China Sports Media agency is the J.League’s distributor inside of China. Both parties’ deals will run until 2022.
In addition, to the existing distribution on K-Ball, the online streaming service of the China Sports Media-owned WinPower, a number of additional Chinese deals have now been put in place with regional sports broadcasters and digital platforms.
Deals have been agreed with Guangzhou Sports Channel and Tianjin Sports Channel, along with IPTV platform Zhejiang Wasu. Agreements are also now in place with Chinese internet giants ByteDance (for the Douyin, Toutiao and Xigua platforms) and Tencent (for Huya and Live.qq.com).
Shortly before the J.League’s resumption in early July, Dentsu negotiated broadcast deals in the the Balkans (SportKlub), German-speaking countries (Sportdigital Fussball) and Thailand (MCOT and SiamSport). These complemented earlier agreements in the likes of Australia (Optus) and Hong Kong (iCable).
Broadcast rights contracts are also in place in Israel (The Sports Channel), Macau (TDM), Malaysia (Astro), Taiwan (Elta) and the UK and Ireland (Premier Sports). SNTV holds worldwide news access rights (excluding Japan).