Sports gradually on the move to streaming sites

[davieG]

People in the Indian subcontinent will, from Friday, have only one way to watch top flight Spanish football: on Facebook.

The social network has signed an exclusive deal to show every La Liga game, for the next three seasons, to viewers in India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, The Maldives, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The rights were previously held by Sony Pictures Network.

The terms of the new deal have not been disclosed. The last time they were for sale, in 2014, they were bought for $32m, according to Reuters.

There are 348m Facebook users in the region, 270m of them are in India.

It is the latest move from Facebook, and the tech industry in general, to invest in highly lucrative sports rights for emerging streaming services.

The social network already shows Major League Baseball to US audiences at a reported cost of $1m per game. As with the rest of Facebook, the content is free but supported by targeted advertising.

Speaking to Reuters, Facebook’s director of global live sports said the La Liga streams would at first be advertising-free, but it was considering how best to implement them in future.

“This is one deal,” Peter Hutton told the news agency. “It’s not something that is a big threat to broadcast world.”

There are 270m Facebook users in India
It’s unlikely broadcasters will see it that way - and they’re wise not to.

Live sport is the major driver of subscriptions to premium cable or satellite services, and the slow creep of technology companies buying up sports rights will have traditional broadcasters concerned.

Since the rise of Netflix and others, live sport has been just about the only thing holding many potential cord-cutters back from making the chop.

The Facebook-La Liga deal is part of a global trend. In the UK, the current Premier League season will be the last time every live match will be shown on a TV channel.

Next season, 20 games will be online-only - viewable only through Amazon. The company will bundle the games in with its Prime subscription service.

Huge TV deals gave the English Premier League global influence

Similarly, in the US, the National Football League (NFL) has renewed last season’s deal with Amazon to bring 11 “Thursday Night Football” matches to Prime. To get them, Amazon had to win a bidding war involving Twitter, YouTube and Verizon.

Outside the US, the National Basketball Association (NBA) is being streamed in China - by online giant Tencent. An average of 2m people watch each game.

We should also consider a major sport of the future - eSports. Watching professional gamers is an industry predicted by some to soon be worth over $1bn a year. Tech giants got there first: the top platforms for eSports viewing are Amazon-owned Twitch and Google's YouTube.

Disney will broadcast the popular Overwatch League
In something of a role reversal, traditional broadcasters are making deals to bring eSports offline and onto regular TV.

Most notably, Disney recently announced a multi-year deal to broadcast live action from Overwatch League, one of the biggest eSports competitions. Disney’s channels, which include ESPN and ABC, will share the action - and it will be streamed online too, of course.

‘We don’t do live sports'
So what does all this platform-shifting mean for world sport?

We’re at the beginning of a financial shift, maybe the biggest since the early 1990s, when the major football leagues in Europe commericialised their competitions to new heights. Transfer fees and wages soared thanks, in a big way, to the phenomenal TV deals these new sporting megabrands could attract.

Is that changing? Perhaps. This year's deal for UK rights for the Premier League came in at £496m less than in 2017 - the first time in the Premier League’s history that TV revenue has dropped year-on-year.

The tech giants have money to burn. With its yearly content budget of $8bn, Netflix could buy the next three seasons of Premier League UK rights twice over. But it doesn’t plan to, saying it won’t follow its competitors.

"We don't do [live] news, we don't do [live] sports,” chief executive Reed Hastings told a room of journalists in Hollywood earlier this year. "But what we do do, we try to do really well.”

With subscriber growth slowing this year, the industry is watching to see how long it can hold on to that stance, especially as its rivals seem eager to open their wallets.

[RoboFox]

I've said it so many times: the moment one of the tech giants bids for football coverage in this country, it's over for Sky and BT.

 

And I don't know why they haven't. People are fed up with paying for over-priced, outdated sports coverage from the traditional rights holders... 

 

People can easily stream the content for free, and the quality is only getting better. Offer them easily accessible, lower priced, great quality pay-as-you-go coverage with great extra content and people will flock to them. Sky and BT have lost their monopoly over football, and I'm all for it. 

 

And they should show EVERY game. The detracting from attendance numbers thing is an absolute fallacy.

 

Edited 14 August 2018 by RoboFox

[davieG]

Just now, RoboFox said:

I've said it so many times: the moment one of the tech giants bids for football coverage in this country, it's over for Sky and BT.

 

And I don't know why they haven't. People are fed up with paying for over-priced, outdated sports coverage from the traditional rights holders... 

 

People can easily stream the content for free, and the quality is only getting better. Offer them easily accessible, lower priced, great quality pay-as-you-go coverage with great extra content and people will flock to them. Sky and BT have lost their monopoly over football, and I'm all for it. 

 

And they should show EVERY game. The detracting from attendance numbers thing is an absolute fallacy.

 

 

Amazon have started with 20 games next season. 

The big problem is, like now they could be spread across a number of streaming sites and unless they are strictly pay to view you could end up forking out a lot of money.

 

I guess we've got the worst of all at the moment having to subscribe to Sky, BT and then Amazon and still not being able to view every game but that is mainly down to the 3pm Saturday KO ruling.

[RoboFox]

7 minutes ago, davieG said:

Amazon have started with 20 games next season. 

The big problem is, like now they could be spread across a number of streaming sites and unless they are strictly pay to view you could end up forking out a lot of money.

 

I guess we've got the worst of all at the moment having to subscribe to Sky, BT and then Amazon and still not being able to view every game but that is mainly down to the 3pm Saturday KO ruling.

Probably should've said "the moment they bid for all coverage"

 

But yeah, agree. The more platforms, the more it's going to cost people. 

[grobyfox1990]

40 minutes ago, RoboFox said:

And they should show EVERY game. The detracting from attendance numbers thing is an absolute fallacy

Definitely isn't a fallacy. Attendances at lower league clubs when there's a big Champions League/PL game on plummet

[ozleicester]

Optus (a division of Singtel) won the rights for the EPL from Foxtel (sky) last year.  It is definitely the future.

[Finnegan]

We are going through a bit of a conundrum at the moment. Logic states a monopoly is always bad and consumer choice is preferred. 

 

Unfortunately, the lack of monopoly here means are football options are spread across a number of services that aren't cooperating so if you want to watch la liga, the Premier league and the bundesliga you need three separate subscription services at a greater cost to us the consumer. 

 

Its an awkward and clumsy service. 

 

Doesn't help that eleven sports have been allowed to bid and win rights to major competitions without any actual end game in place and ready for the new season. 

[The Horse's Mouth]

37 minutes ago, Finnegan said:

We are going through a bit of a conundrum at the moment. Logic states a monopoly is always bad and consumer choice is preferred. 

 

Unfortunately, the lack of monopoly here means are football options are spread across a number of services that aren't cooperating so if you want to watch la liga, the Premier league and the bundesliga you need three separate subscription services at a greater cost to us the consumer. 

 

Its an awkward and clumsy service. 

 

Doesn't help that eleven sports have been allowed to bid and win rights to major competitions without any actual end game in place and ready for the new season. 

what do you mean? they offer a pass online to watch it

[Rocket-Ron]

2 hours ago, RoboFox said:

I've said it so many times: the moment one of the tech giants bids for football coverage in this country, it's over for Sky and BT.

 

And I don't know why they haven't. People are fed up with paying for over-priced, outdated sports coverage from the traditional rights holders... 

 

People can easily stream the content for free, and the quality is only getting better. Offer them easily accessible, lower priced, great quality pay-as-you-go coverage with great extra content and people will flock to them. Sky and BT have lost their monopoly over football, and I'm all for it. 

 

And they should show EVERY game. The detracting from attendance numbers thing is an absolute fallacy.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, grobyfox1990 said:

Definitely isn't a fallacy. Attendances at lower league clubs when there's a big Champions League/PL game on plummet

This was on the BBC site today https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/44850888

A lot of the lower league clubs do need there attendances

[urban.spaceman]

The music industry had Napster... which lead to iTunes.

The film/TV industry had The Pirate Bay... which lead to Netflix.

The sports industry has streaming.

 

It's the same pattern over and over again. A method of piracy becomes available to consumers which makes it 1000x easier to consume your product. And the industry still refuses to adapt. They resist it for years and years, and then what happens? They eventually relent and finally give people what they want.

 

It's not rocket science. The question is finding the right way to do it; it's going to happen anyway. Well, it already is.

[ajthefox]

It might be easier to stream but I imagine we will all still have the same problem in terms of coverage because they'll sell different packages to different streaming sites.

[davieG]

I reckon the price you may have to pay for online streaming of all games will be playing at a different time like Sunday. I also wonder what will happen to the regular channels as they need games to KO off at a variety of times to fill their air time.

 

[Stadt]

Only way to do it is to have multiple broadcasters have the rights to all games as then there's competition but more consumer friendly, I'm not sure if that is workable in reality though.