Melita Cable plc must have been taken aback by the ruling given by the Broadcasting Authority last week.

The BA ordered Melita Cable to make arrangements with a free-to-air television station to transmit live eight of the 64 FIFA World Cup games. And what games! The quarter-finals, the semi-finals, the match for third place and the final itself.

In its ruling, the BA said this arrangement creates “a reasonable balance between the interests of the televiewers and today’s economic realities resulting from a harsher competition in the distribution of television rights”.

The television rights issue has dominated the local news, particularly in terms of sport events, for the past months.

For many years, Maltese viewers could watch all football games transmitted by Rai and later Mediaset, for free. The arrival on the scene of Melita Cable saw the launch of the Sports Channel which, for a number of years, broadcast matches from the English and Italian top division against payment. The games broadcast by Rai and Mediaset were still available to Melita subscribers.

Last year, Multiplus entered the scene in direct competition with Melita and things started to change. Multiplus won the rights to transmit the home games of 15 of the 20 Serie A teams, with Melita responding by adding the German and Spanish leagues to its portfolio. Many Italian football followers shifted to Multiplus to be able to watch their favourite team play.

But this was just the start of a complex game as, months down the line, Melita announced that it had won the rights to transmit the World Cup, the Champions League Games and the Formula 1 races – against payment.

This meant that what had been available for years for free was no longer so. Champions League games shown on Mediaset and Formula 1 races on Rai are being blocked by Melita and shown only on its sports channels.

Both Multiplus and Melita are also blocking those events for which the rights are owned by the competitor.

All this has sparked a flurry of complaints from irate viewers and the newspapers have been carrying letters and opinion pieces on the matter for the past few weeks. Many consumers feel that it is not right that they are paying for a package and then one of the channels in that package is blocked without an alternative channel or compensation offered. Others have said that it is not right that such an important event as the World Cup should only be seen by those who pay for it. Many question whether it is correct to block signals when these can still be received via aerial.

It is a complicated issue.

What is for sure is that there is no turning back. Television service providers pay big money to obtain the rights, especially for major sports events, and as expected the cost will be passed on to the consumer. Gone are the days when television is free, unless of course one relies on the old aerial system – although this will most likely change too if signals are blocked from abroad.

Harsh competition in the sector has created this scenario. Television service providers who pay large sums of money for these rights must safeguard their interests and their target is to recoup their expenses from their consumers.

But the television service providers should have explained the process to their subscribers and what told them what problems could arise. It would probably have saved these companies a lot of flak. Very few people could have foreseen what was coming. Many televiewers feel that things have developed far too quickly and, for instance, it is unfair that one day they could watch a game but the next day it is blocked.

They did not have the time to adjust to the situation, and people who paid months in advance are frustrated that they were not told what was going to happen.

A strong public relations exercise, before the changes were made, would have gone a long way toward explaining to, and appeasing, a very angry customer base.