13 things you need to know today about the shifting sports media landscape View in Browser
Leaders in Sport
Broadcast Disruptors Bulletin: 13 things you need to know today about the shifting sports media landscape

Bulletin length: 2,621 words – it’s a 9-minute read
 
Short Form
Learnings from Leaders Week
Bursting with potential: the Balloon World Cup 
Fanatics and the content wildcards 
Women’s sport continues its rise 
The world’s most valuable brands – and the content companies making the cut 
BBC Director General on the big trends 
Uefa goes to market with Champions League rights
Sony secures Bundesliga in India
Barney Francis joins IMG 
Marc Watson back in charge at Eleven 
Top job changes hands at Deltatre
NHL rebrands European primetime games 
LaLiga debuts new OTT platform 

Long form

The Big Picture
Thanks for clicking and welcome to the latest Broadcast Disruptors Bulletin, a regular briefing on the things that matter in sports broadcasting and content creation. Good to have you with us. 

Don’t forget that we live for your correspondence – get in touch, with juicy gossip, scurrilous speculation, hard news or strong opinions at david.cushnan@leadersinsport.com and james.emmett@leadersinsport.com.  

As the dust settles on Leaders Week London (in point of fact the dust settled almost immediately thanks to the ruthlessly efficient Leaders operations team), there’s been a chance to reflect on some of the major themes talked about on stage, in the hallways and at the bar(s). Unsurprisingly, how we’ll consume sport in future was the big topic of conversation. 

Two phrases jumped out time and again – the immersive experience and micropayments. 

Powered by fast-developing technology, the ability to deliver fans, viewers, consumers a truly immersive sports-watching experience feels closer than ever – although not without significant complication. Real-time development platform Unity was on hand in London to showcase its new sports solution. Using volumetric technology, it can deliver 3D footage, making sports viewable from any angle at any moment in time.  

The technology, as demonstrated by former Liverpool FC CEO-turned-Unity sports lead Peter Moore, is undeniably impressive, but as the company’s Head of Business Operations and Partnerships Tian Pei shrewdly noted, an even bigger challenge than developing the solution may be getting the world of sport to work together to make it a viable, mainstream option. 

“It takes every single stakeholder working together, advancing together, to make all of this work,” she said on stage. “If we talk about making volumetric work in sports, we have to tap into the IP owners, the rights holders, the broadcasters, the marketers and sponsors, and fundamentally we need to get all the underlying technology – the networks, the carriers, the computer providers, cloud providers, devices, data partners; it really takes everyone working together for this to be adopted. But we don’t think this is too far off into the future.” 

The challenge with microtransactions, meanwhile, seems to be how and where they can fit into existing rights models, carefully constructed over time and, as a primary revenue stream for most rights holders, fiercely protected. 

Recast’s Andy Meikle, for one, believes his company have hit on a new model. “We often talk about how we look like an OTT platform but share like a social [platform] and monetise like gaming; that’s precisely what we offer – and there’s lots of learning we should take from the esports and gaming industry in the way they engage with their fans on a regular basis; there’s an always-on approach, but they’re always chipping away and monetising them on a regular basis.” 

Whether it’s how you watch or how you pay to watch, the nods to the world of gaming are clearer than ever; without the luxury of starting from scratch, however, folding both new immersive technologies and fresh ways to pay into sturdy, established business models could yet prove to be a jarring process for the whole of sport. 
Eyes On This
​​​​​​Watch how these three things develop to understand the future

 -  Inflated figures: The most intriguing and interesting sports broadcast of the week was the debut of an innovative new, streaming-first format, inspired by this TikTok. The inaugural Balloon World Cup, held in Tarragona, was co-created by Gerard Pique and his Kosmos organisation, as part of its collaboration with Spanish streamer Ibai Llanos, who made headlines – and a feature in the New York Times – recently, following his conversation with Lionel Messi on the platform (quick sidebar: Twitch, which has been built predominantly on English-language content, reports that seven of the ten fastest growing streamers on the platform in September were Spanish; Ibai leads the way, with 8.2 million followers). Back in June, Ibai and Kosmos teamed up to acquire the Spanish rights to the Copa America, which was broadcast live on Twitch. They have also acquired an esports team together. Its latest format – featuring 16 national teams and a game based on battling to keep a balloon in the air whilst navigating a variety of home furniture - was watched live by over two million viewers and some eight million in less than 12 hours. A TikTok-inspired, streaming-first, innovative new sports experience: welcome to the future.
 
 -  Fanatics branches out:
Michael Rubin and Fanatics don’t, as various strands of the sports industry have found out, tend to do things by halves, so his long-term vision, laid out on stage last week at Sports Business Journal’s CAA World Congress of Sports, is worth noting. “Five years from now, you’re going to Fanatics, and you can watch a bunch of media there of live sports,” said Rubin, who founded Fanatics as an online seller of merchandise but has more recently branched out into NFTs and betting, using the data it has on its 80 million existing customer base to do so. Rubin, describing the future Fanatics one-stop shop app, added: “You can bet on sports with or without betting states. You can buy your merchandise, you can get tickets, you can trade your trading cards, trade your NFTs. We think we have huge structural advantages that benefit the sports properties.” Fanatics as a player in future live sports rights acquisition and, more generally, as a creator of sports content is certainly a tantalising one. Throw them into the wildcard category alongside several of the major US betting operators, plus the likes of Peloton, Walmart, Roblox, Zoom and Salesforce, all of whom have large customer bases and data sets to use as a starting point in building a sports content offshoot. Salesforce is already on its way, with the launch of Salesforce+, a streaming service featuring live and original programming, thought leadership and expert advice for a business audience. 

 -  Women’s sport, rising:
Research commissioned for a new report on women’s sport by Leaders and Sky Sports has found that 21% of UK adults follow more women’s sport now than they did before the pandemic hit. The metrics are moving in the rights direction, as are the number of broadcast hours being dedicated to women’s sports events and leagues – in the UK, for example, Sky and the BBC’s coverage of the Women’s Super League has rolled out to widespread acclaim in recent weeks, while DAZN’s global coverage of the Uefa Women’s Champions League in partnership with YouTube has provided accessible new coverage of a tournament growing in prestige. The work, however, is ongoing. “Clearly there has been a growth in the interest and we’ve seen that in record audience and just the growth in the number of people that are engaging in the sports,” says Jonathan Licht, Sky Sports’ Managing Director, in the report, “but being completely honest, we’re not at the same level that we see for the Premier League or the men’s Hundred; the audience has been probably double that of the women’s Hundred, but still, that’s significant progress so it’s important to us to make sure that we keep building on that growth and that’s why we think a little bit differently around the scheduling and the distribution and probably playing a little bit more of a long game about how we think of our rights investments.”

The Numbers

Visual Capitalist’s latest graphic identifies the world’s most valuable brands; it also provides a helpful big picture perspective as the broadcast and content ecosystem spreads. How many companies active in the content and distribution game can you spot? 


Source: Visual Capitalist
 
Production Notes



In the Mixed Zone with… BBC Director General, Tim Davie

In the week when Barbara Slater, the BBC’s Director of Sport, told a UK parliament select committee that the corporation has over the past few years spent between 7% and 10% of its overall budget on sports rights, here’s a few snippets from Director General Tim Davie speaking at Leaders Week London a couple of weeks ago. Davie, in conversation on stage with Wimbledon CEO Sally Bolton, discussed his leadership philosophy and identified some of the macro trends facing the BBC.

On offering something different
We're not trying to beat Netflix. We’re not going to beat Netflix; my kids love Netflix, that’s not a problem. But the biggest television show in Britain today is the regional news at 6:30. Bigger than any television, if you add it up by year. Every now and again we get a ‘Vigil’ or something that’s a bit bigger on the night. But that’s because we’re doing something completely different.

On keeping things compelling
Our biggest, and your biggest, problem or challenge is how many people want to watch long-form three hour matches versus clips. We’ve got to make it compelling, with formats and timings - and in my world, gaming – just attention. The internet takes away distribution advantage, so if you’ve got a couple of channels or four, life is okay. Once you’ve got infinite choice, you’ve got a huge plethora of competition. We’re going to exist alongside three or four other big services in your life. You see the Netflix, the Disneys, and we’re going to be competing with some of the things like the dramas and stuff. So at certain levels we’re competing, but the big picture is actually attention versus gaming, YouTube, all those other platforms. Time and relevance, the battle is on, I’m telling you. 

On how he unwinds
I really do switch off, by the way. Weekends and things should be respected, and all that BS around ‘Oh, I gotta work -’ we don’t do that, where I work. If there’s an emergency, we work, if not, we don’t. For me, I run a lot and I keep running, in a very Forrest Gump-type way. And I also read a lot of novels. I don’t read business books. I scan them every now and again but I read novels. I just escape into different worlds and I find that really enriching. And I watch a lot of sport and listen to a lot of sport. Sport on the radio in the garden, lovely.



Rights Watch

Uefa goes to market with Champions League rights
In a significant move, Uefa has issued a request for proposals for the sale of commercial rights to their club competitions, a contract that has been held by the TEAM Marketing agency since the first iteration of the Uefa Champions League in 1992-93. The request covers the 2024-27 cycle and includes the Champions League, Europa League, Europa Conference League, Uefa Super Cup and Uefa Youth League. While TEAM is said to remain firmly in contention to keep the rights, the opening up of a tender is expected to set off a sports rights agency frenzy, with interest anticipated from major players such as IMG, Infront, Mediapro and Lagardere.

Sony secures Bundesliga in India 
Germany’s DFL has announced it has reached an agreement with Sony Pictures Network India for broadcast rights to the Bundesliga in the Indian subcontinent. The deal will see the league broadcast in India, as well as Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Pakistan via the SPN’s linear sports channels, and will last until the end of the 2022-23 season. Fans will also be able to watch the Bundesliga games through Sony’s Indian region OTT platform, SonyLIV, for on-demand content. Sony replaces Star as the Bundesliga’s Indian broadcast partner. Star has the rights to the Premier League, while as of this season MTV/Viacom18 is broadcasting live Serie A, LaLiga and Ligue 1 in the country.



Jobs Board

Francis replaces Fry at IMG
IMG has hired former Sky Sports Managing Director Barney Francis as its Executive Vice President and Head of Global Production, as current Chair of their production business Graham Fry prepares for his retirement at the end of 2022. Francis, who will start at IMG in early November, comes with over 20 years of experience with Sky Sports, and is widely credited as one of the key figures in the broadcaster’s growth in the UK. Said Francis: “I’m proud to be joining the team at IMG at such a pivotal moment in the sports industry. As consumption habits continue to change, the offering we’ll debut will help teams, leagues and federations reach new and existing fans in creative and compelling ways.”

Eleven rings the changes
Marc Watson has returned to the role of CEO at Eleven, following the departure of Luis Vicente. Watson has spent the past 18 months as Executive Chairman of the company he co-founded with Andrea Radrizzani, focusing on the launch of Eleven Group’s LiveNow platform. Radrizzani will now become Executive Chairman. In other changes, Alessandro Tucci has joined Eleven as Chief Operating Officer, while Anouk Mertens, the company’s COO since 2018, becomes Chief Content Officer. She will oversee efforts to integrate Team Whistle Studios and Neo Studios into Eleven Group. 

Rinaudo calls it a day at Deltatre
Sports and entertainment technology provider Deltatre has announced a change of leadership, with long-time CEO Giampiero Rinaudo set to step down at the end of the month, to be replaced by Chief Commercial Officer and Deputy CEO Andrea Marini. Rinaudo co-founded the business in 1986 and will remain as non-executive Chairman in his retirement. Rinaudo recently wrote about the business of transformation in a Leaders special report on the concept of ‘owning the fans’.



Production

NHL rebrands European prime-time games
In a move designed to expand and feed its international fanbase, the National Hockey League (NHL) has rebranded its ‘European Game of the Week’ initiative; this initiative was originally introduced in 2018 to highlight the NHLs biggest stars, approximately 30% of which hail from European countries, in some of their home territories. The rebrand has included a name change from “NHL European Game of the Week” to ‘NHL Saturday’ and ‘NHL Sunday’, which was actioned partially to avoid the word ‘European’ and avoid generalisation. With the NHL season now underway, the league has broadcast partnerships in place in over 30 European countries, with commitments to show up to 36 European primetime games during the regular season.



Distribution

LaLiga launches new OTT platform
LaLiga has announced plans to launch a new international over-the-top (OTT) platform. The ‘LaLiga Pass’ which will be rolled out early next year will offer content such as highlights, interviews, press conferences and magazine features. LaLiga President Javier Tebas says the project has taken inspiration from the NBA’s League Pass product, and stated that, while broadcasters will be able to include live match streams through the platform, this will only be the case if the broadcaster explicitly agrees to do so. “It is not going be direct broadcasting of games, unless the broadcaster so wishes,” he confirmed, speaking at Sportel earlier this month. 


​​​​​
The Broadcast Disruptors Bulletin is written by David Cushnan, James Emmett, Jade Amies and Cameron Macdonald.

Thanks for reading this edition of the Broadcast Disruptors Bulletin. If you haven’t subscribed yet, do remember to opt-in here.

Series Advisors
 
Leaders in Sport

Leaders
Tuition House
27-37 St George's Road
Wimbledon
SW19 4EU
London


Tel +44 (0)207 042 8666

Unsubscribe
 
© 2021 Leaders. All Rights Reserved.