I’m just going to quickly leave this here because it’s a story of some note: the Spanish Supreme Court has ordered Antena 3 to stop broadcasting its hit quiz Pasapalabra over a dispute of who is licenced to use its long-standing endgame El Rosco – we know it as “that show with the massive bote/jackpots”. Here’s the story in El Pais which will go into more detail – basically ITV Studios owns The Alphabet Game, but El Rosco was an addition by the Italian version of the show Pasaparola, and that addition to the format is owned by Dutch company MC&F. A3 can keep making the show, but they can’t for now use its iconic endgame without financial penalty.
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I’ll put a few updates here:
* Antena 3 has kept broadcasting El Rosco for the last few days and doesn’t look likely to stop for a while. The apparent reasoning is that, unlike what Telecinco were told in 2019, A3 was never given a court order to stop broadcasting El Rosco immediately and don’t believe that the court decision has any real effect, so it seems like they plan to keep broadcasting it until they officially can’t.
* That day might come sooner than we think: Telecinco has taken the rather Machiavellian step of buying the rights to El Rosco specifically so that Antena 3 can’t keep airing it. They’re planning to make a new game show with El Rosco as the final round: naturally, A3 can’t complain about it violating the order that Telecinco can never broadcast “Pasapalabra or any similar format” if El Rosco isn’t part of Pasapalabra anymore
* The day after the Supreme Court ruling on El Rosco, another court in Madrid found that Telecinco clearly hasn’t bothered to give ITV Studios the €15 million – later upped to €45 million – ordered for airing the format without paying back in 2019. The court upped the fine to €73 million (whether Mediaset will bother paying up is another story).
The whole thing doesn’t look like it will end yet – the reason why Telecinco wants El Rosco so badly is that it aired Pasapalabra as a lead-in to the news, and Antena 3 has led the 9pm news ratings war, which Telecinco won until it lost Pasapalabra, since it took up the format in 2020. In any case, Andrew O’Connor must be making squillones of Euro.