Radio Televisyen Malaysia (RTM) has announced that it will broadcast FIFA World Cup 2022 which will be taking place in Qatar from 20 November to 18 December. Alongside Astro for the pay-TV segment, the K-KOMM outfit is the only official Malaysian free-to-air broadcaster for the event so far.
Similar to the previous edition in 2018, RTM will be featuring 41 out of 64 games from the event which is equivalent to around 130 hours of game time. Out of these matches, only 27 will be shown live by the public broadcaster but RTM has guaranteed that the list of the live matches still includes the final game.
Another guaranteed live game is the first match of the event which will be between the host Qatar and Ecuador on 21 November at 12:00 AM Malaysian time. As of the other 14 matches, it will be shown in the form of delayed telecasts.
Meanwhile, RTM revealed that it has to fork out RM32.5 million in order to make the FIFA World Cup Qatar broadcast possible. Hence, it is not surprising that the Minister of Communications and Multimedia, Annuar Musa during his speech today has called out government-linked companies and the private sector to come and work together with the national public broadcaster to offset the cost.
On a related note, Qatar will also be the last FIFA World Cup to have 32 teams as the number of teams will be increased to 48 teams for the 2026 edition that will be co-hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
(Source: Berita RTM, K-KOMM / Facebook.)
