Red Card Radio – Singapore’s first sports radio station launched last Sunday ahead of the new Barclays Premier League season this weekend.

Last month, Red Card, one of the region’s best known sports marketing agencies surprised many within the radio industry by signing an exclusive contract to broadcast live English football commentaries in the city state.

The three-year deal was made with UK national sports radio network talkSPORT, which owns global audio rights to the BPL.

Red Card announced it would launch its own 24 hour sports radio station and air football commentaries in English, Mandarin and Malay.

The station has partnered with cable TV giant Starhub, which is offering the station on its starhubtvanywhere.com platform until October for free.

For more on the decision and their plans, Asia Radio Today spoke to R Sasikumar, Red Card’s Managing Director.

1.  There’s a lot of interest in your all-sports radio station.  What were the key clinchers that made you decide to do it and now?

For such a sports-mad country, we found it surprising that there wasn’t a dedicated sports radio station in Singapore. With the construction of the new National Stadium, we expect many more world class sports events to happen on our shores and we want to be there to cover every single one of them. We saw a serious gap in the market.

This project has been in the pipeline for the last 18 months. We couldn’t launch the station without any marquee content. And when we reached an agreement with talkSPORT in the UK for the Premier League rights, we went into action in putting the station in place. We have brought in radio experts to help us in this process. It’s an exciting time for all of us at Red Card.

2.  How much did the rights cost and are you only allowed to broadcast in Singapore?

We can’t comment on this, we are contractually obligated to keep this private and confidential.

3.  What makes you think that you can get sports fans back listening to commentaries on radio? 

We understand a football fan’s concerns with the rising cost of subscription on the television. We want to provide the fans with a cheaper alternative and what better way than to bring nostalgia and football back home on the radio. This will also reach out to people on the go and they will not miss out on any Premier League action.

The station will be interactive as we want to hear the fans. Singaporeans are opinionated about everything, good or bad. If we have something to say we say it. Especially about Football, so we want to capture an audience that make us their way of life and a source for information and entertainment.

4.  How do you plan to monetise the station?

Just like any other radio station, we will be looking at ad sales and shows sponsorship. We plan to use creative ways to allow advertisers to reach out to their target audience. Engaging the target audience will be key to the success of the station which in return will allow us to monetise the station.

5.  What are the licensing issues for an online radio station in Singapore?

There are no licensing issues for an online radio station in Singapore as our carriage partner StarHub did the necessary to get the approval to broadcast on their platforms.

6.  Can you explain a bit more about the programming.  Will it only run on weekends?  Will you be repeating match commentaries?  How many matches will you cover?

On the weekends, we will have live commentary of the matches from England. Typically, we will broadcast 3 matches on a Saturdays, 2 on Sundays and 1 on certain Mondays.

Before transmitting that broadcast, we will have a live call-in show to provide the fans with a platform to air their concerns. For our launch we have 4 locally produced weekly shows.

Each show will be about 1-2 hours. The commentaries and shows will be repeated at different timeslots to allow those who had missed the broadcast to tune in. However, we intend to do an evening drive time segment daily if we can close a sponsor in the next week or so.

7.  How does this fit into the rest of the Redcard business?

Red Card has always prided ourselves in sports. Everything we do is based on our passion for sports. The events that we have organised over the years certainly reflected our drive and vision. We revived the prestige of the Lion City Cup, a youth tournament to provide the young players with a global stage to shine.

The addition of the radio will not stop our events business as we want to be able to use both platforms to increase the profile of sports in Singapore. We want to create the largest platform for the male demographics which is the gap in the market right now. W

e have plans to launch our own sports magazine which will be given away free and a MTV style YouTube football channel looking at the lighter side of football. We now can go to clients and offer them a whole suite of services and media platforms. As we are marketers to begin with, our skills sets will allow us to tailor make campaigns for clients with all the resources at our disposal.