By Gerard Wong

COMING soon to cable television: a half-hour weekly series on the National School Games showing all the highlights of this year's inter-school sports competitions.

Episodes of the series will also be available for viewing at any time on various websites and other online platforms.

Related link: » Village people

If this programme sounds familiar, it is because a similar half-hour weekly series was shown on MediaCorp's Channel 5 last year.

Called 'The Schools Nationals', the 13-episode series was the first to feature school sports on terrestrial television. It was a collaboration between the Ministry of Education (MOE), the Singapore Sports Council (SSC) and MediaCorp.

However, sources say StarHub will replace MediaCorp as the broadcast partner this year.

The yet-to-be-named programme will be screened on one of StarHub's sports channels from next month.

It is believed to be the free sports channel that the cable TV operator will be launching soon.

SSC deputy director (media relations and social media), Jose Raymond, declined to confirm StarHub's appointment, saying in an e-mail reply:

'The SSC, together with our many partners, will always do whatever is necessary, to develop the local sports media industry in a way that keeps it relevant and engaging for Singaporeans and the public at large.

'As details are being finalised, an official announcement over the plans for the broadcast of the National School Games will be made shortly.'

Likewise, StarHub's e-mail response to The Straits Times' queries was couched in general terms.

Said Kathleen Syron, StarHub's head of content: 'We have been working closely with the Singapore Sports Council to offer local sporting events to television viewers in Singapore - more notably, the inaugural Asian Youth Games and the Standard Chartered Marathon in June and December last year respectively.

'We can divulge that we are exploring a number of initiatives with the SSC and will be pleased to share details with all in due course.'

Sources say the partnership is a done deal, and that a media event will be held next week to announce this.

Local production house Mega Media has also been engaged to produce the programme and has already started filming events.

Its crew were spotted by The Straits Times filming the inaugural Opening Ceremony of the National School Games at Raffles Institution (Secondary) on Monday and interviewing Singapore Schools Sports Council chairman Lim Lai Chuan after the event.

StarHub has 535,000 subscribers while every household in Singapore can receive MediaCorp's free-to-air channels.

Although StarHub's reach is not as extensive as MediaCorp's channels, it is understood that the SSC intends to use its own online platforms to make the sports programme more accessible to youths and the public.

The SSC will air the programme on its SingaporeSports.sg website and put up video clips from the programme on social networking site Facebook, and photo and video-sharing site Flickr.

According to sources, the SSC's decision to use these online platforms was spurred by the response to the official Asian Youth Games website it set up last year.

During the nine-day, multi-sport event (June 29 - July 7), the website received 170,000 'unique visitors' from 41 countries and racked up 2.6 million page views. The term 'unique visitors' represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to a website over the course of a specified time period.

This worked out to about 19,000 'unique visitors' a day and almost 290,000 pages views daily.

Also, the live webcasts of the various competitions were watched by 160,000 viewers.

NBC, which maintained broadcast rights to the 2008 Beijing Games in the United States, reported an average of 4.3 million unique users a day on its Olympics website. Yahoo!, which also featured extensive online video from the Olympics, averaged 4.7 million, according to media accounts.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.