Barcelona launch a new television channel Barca One.
Barça TV, FC Barcelona’s television channel, went off the air on June 30th. It was a painful decision by Joan Laporta’s board and a consequence of the viability plan presented by the club to La Liga, which required drastic cost-cutting measures. The club’s economic vice president, Eduard Romeu, explained that the television channel had an expenditure of fourteen million euros and revenues of two million.
Taking into account the agreement with Telefónica, the club ended up spending between six and eight million. Barça TV, which had been broadcasting since 1999, closed on June 30th, but from that very day, the board started working on a new project that is expected to be presented soon. In fact, its chief, Toni Cruz, a seasoned audiovisual expert with extensive experience in the entertainment industry, first as a member of the group ‘La Trinca’ and later as the creator of the production company Gestmusic, plans to present it in the coming days to club executives and officials.
This way, Barcelona will reconnect with its members and fans through an OTT, a content platform, dubbed “the Netflix of Barça,” as it’s already being called at the club. The idea is for the application to be much more modern, groundbreaking, and revolutionary than the old Barça TV, with a much lower cost than the fourteen million it used to incur, which is logical because it won’t require a television license and its structure will be much smaller.
It will offer all the latest news about the club. Matches, training sessions, and press conferences will return, along with original content such as reports, interviews, and documentaries featuring club athletes. In the new television project, in addition to Toni Cruz, some former Barça TV employees who have been rehired by FC Barcelona have been working for weeks.
