BarcelonaBackground movement in DTT. The Gol channel is no longer merely sports and, from this Friday, it will also include series and cinema. In fact, in the last few weeks, he had already tried to introduce various contents to his grid, taking advantage of the drought of summer competitions. The good results have encouraged the chain, from the MediaPro group, to regularly combine live broadcasts of sporting events with other genres of entertainment. Taking advantage of the remodeling, the channel changes its name and becomes Gol Play.
The driver of this change is the realization that the channel collected good results with the sport it offered live, but dropped drastically with the repetitions with which it filled the grids if there was no competition in progress at that time. The series that have been announced allow us to sense that Gol Play is now looking to make a place among the channels aimed mainly at the male audience: The A-Team, cobra alert, The fantastic car o Miami Vice. Among the films, there are confirmed titles like The jaguar o Armed and pissed off. The purchase of realities, contests and factual. Thus, it will compete with Mediaset’s Energy and Atresmedia’s Neox, which scored 2.1% and 1.8% screen share on average in 2021, respectively. Gol, on the other hand, barely got 1.0% of share.
In fact, Gol is already the evolution of Gol Televisión, the channel that the conglomerate led by Jaume Roures launched in September 2008, taking advantage of one of the gaps available in one of Atresmedia’s multiple channels. The idea was to open the pay-per-view mode on DTT, which until now had been completely free in Spain, and offer 12 matches for 12 euros. But the vice-president of the government María Teresa Fernández de la Vega frustrated these plans and had to wait a season to be able to launch it, under the name Gol T. A commercial war then broke out with Sogecable, which maintained the pay channel Canal+ La Liga.
That brand remained until June 30, 2015, when it stopped broadcasting to give way to Mega, a thematic channel, in terms of free-to-air television, and beIN Sports, as the sports brand of MediaPro – 50% owned by a Qatari group – in the field of pay television. A year later, however, the Catalan company relaunched Gol on free television, in this case re-leasing the frequency to Veo Televisión, owned by Unidad Editorial, publisher ofThe world. Since then, the channel has hovered between an annual low of 0.7% share in 2020 and a high of 1.1% just a year earlier. Its best monthly data was in February 2017, with 1.4% of share. And the most watched broadcast was the second leg of the Copa del Rey semi-final, which pitted Barça against Atlético de Madrid, which reached an average of 5.3 million viewers and a 26.5%
“Thanks to the new fiction and entertainment content, Gol aspires to reach more audiences and impact new ones targets audience”, Kiku Carbonell, director of the chain, explains to ARA. “This is a bet that strengthens the segments that do not broadcast live content and that complement the best live sport. We have been leading the sports theme for the last six years and now we will be able to reach new viewers, beyond sports”.
In recent years, the channel has broadcast competitions such as the 2019 Women’s World Cup, the Fifa Confederations Cup, the Futsal World Cup, relevant boxing matches, the UFC, the open match of the Santander League, the match in open of the UEFA Europa League or two matches per day of Primera Iberdrola.
Ricardo Rosety, signed
Some of the channel’s most popular faces maintain their presence on Gol, such as Manolo Lama, Gemma Soler, Mónica Benavent or Irati Vidal. But, for this new stage, the addition of Ricardo Rosety has also been announced, coming from the rival ranks of Movistar+. Born in Asturias in 1977, this sports journalist has left his mark on SER, Onda Cero and Cope, where he has directed several sports programs. In 2010 he was cited by Gol Televisió as a presenter of news and special debate programs, but in 2019 he was hired by Movistar+ to be the narrator of Liga Santander matches. Rosety will be on the field during the matches that will be narrated live by Jordi Domínguez and Aitor Lagunas.
On the other hand, MediaPro announced yesterday the launch of Bar TV, a platform in streaming designed to offer all football and other sports in the hospitality sector. The main advantage of its proposal, according to the company, is that it is a unique distribution model, for which there is no need to purchase additional packages with any operator.
