As the Africa Cup of Nations kicks off in Egypt, television channels are finally ready to broadcast the matches and produce the debriefing, debate, and commentary programs that generally complement the channels' programming.
On the public channel side, the UAR has negotiated rights for the public channels belonging to its organization. A total of 32 countries in French-speaking, English-speaking, and Portuguese-speaking sub-Saharan Africa have picked up the signals for the first matches of the CAN, including 17 in French-speaking Africa:
ORTB (Benin)
RTB (Burkina Faso)
CRTV (Cameroon)
ORTC (Comoros)
RTC (Congo)
RTNC (DRC)
GRTS (Gambia)
RTG and CIS MEDIA (Guinea Conakry)
RTI (Ivory Coast)
TVM (Madagascar)
ORTM (Mali)
ORTN (Niger)
RBA (Rwanda)
RTS and GFM (replay 1 hour after the match) (Senegal)
TVT (Togo)
RTC (Central African Republic)
RTGE (Equatorial Guinea)
At the last Discop, Aboubacry Ba, Director of CIS MEDIA, challenged the policy prohibiting the sublicensing of matches to private channels. He ultimately won his case and became the only private channel in French-speaking Africa able to broadcast CAN 2019 matches.
Read also: CAN 2019: Sharing or exclusivity of sports rights?
In Senegal, GFM, which held the CAN rights before they were reallocated to the UAR in April, has retained the right to broadcast the matches, but only on a delayed basis. At the same time, the matches are broadcast live on RFM, the radio station of the GFM group, which has acquired the rights.
The channels that have acquired the rights to broadcast the CAN have access to all the matches but reserve the right to broadcast them according to their needs and constraints. However, the majority of channels have confirmed that they will broadcast all the matches. It is possible that on channels with only one channel, some matches will be broadcast on a delayed basis, as several matches may be played at the same time.
This will not be the case in most of the major French-speaking African countries, as public media groups have several channels enabling them to cover all matches live. In addition, the UAR will provide channels that are unable to provide their own commentary with commentary in French or English.
Advertising space on public channels is marketed in two ways:
Either directly through their advertising agencies (for national advertisers) or through the solution offered by the MCNC advertising agency for international advertisers, which has several advertising screens reserved for these advertisers for each match.
See also: Interview with Cédric Aoun, CEO of MCNC
For its part, CANAL+ has acquired exclusive pay-TV rights to broadcast all matches and has supplemented its editorial offering with a program called JOUR DE CAN, broadcast after each day of competition in the early evening, and is marketing its advertising space to major pan-African advertisers.
Read also: CAN 2019: CANAL+'s broadcasting schedule
CAN 2019: CANAL+ Advertising's commercial offering
Beyond the broadcasts of the matches, the event is making headlines on news channels and radio stations: France 24 and RFI in particular have announced the implementation of a specific program: