Will Live Match Streaming Boost The Bottom Line Of Sports Clubs?
The rise in live video streaming capabilities and consumer popularity has seen all the major social media platforms scrambling to sign deals with sports leagues and broadcast rights holders. With sports fuelling this fourth wave of social media evolution, can sports clubs directly benefit from these hook-ups?
History appears to suggest that sports clubs won’t see a direct dime. The deals appear to have been struck without any consultation with clubs, in the same way many pro leagues handle their televised packages. Clubs haven’t teamed up to challenge the status quo because these ‘traditional’ distribution agreements continue to produce bigger returns for them with each passing deal.
However there are signs that this cash cow model may soon dry up:
- Traditional televised audiences are in decline in mature broadcast markets
- There are only so many new global markets the likes of the Premier League can penetrate
- Despite this latest massive guaranteed payday, reports claim that the big six Premier League clubs have held discussions about forming a breakaway group to protect their future commercial interests abroad
- Manchester United created a new CEO of Media role. This suggests a renewed commercial focus on media assets, now that digital distribution technology has finally caught up with consumer demand
We are now entering a mobile-first sports broadcasting era. The last collective TV agreement proved increasingly difficult to keep 20 Premier League clubs united. So should the Premier League be looking to its inaugural live streaming deal to give its 20 team members a bigger controlling stake?
The Premier League is currently the most lucrative sports league in the world that has no social platform streaming deal in place. Its biggest domestic rights holder partner, BSkyB, purchased its digital distribution rights back in 2015 and will hold on to them until the 2019/2020 season. To date, Sky Sports has partnered with Twitter in an attempt to retain its shrinking millennial customer base, inking a highlights deal at the beginning of this season and live streaming transfer deadline day to a growing mobile-first audience.
With several seasons to run on that Sky Sports deal, the Premier League looks set to fall further behind LaLiga when it comes to live streaming experimentation and inevitable commercialisation. LaLiga used Facebook Live to stream both Copa del Rey semi-finals, receiving over 3.8 million views for both matches. Now it plans to showcase Friday night games for free, expanding the global audience and popularity of its brand and product.
League wide live streaming also boosts the social properties of competing clubs. The network effect of LaLiga live streaming was the opportunity for clubs to run digital marketing campaigns to increase their Facebook fan bases. The Copa del Rey match between Celta Vigo and Alaves drew over two million Facebook Live viewers, increasing the viewership of a game between two teams that collectively have under 510k Facebook followers.
In the short-term, this appears to be the main direct benefit to clubs of the Live Streaming movement. The challenge for social media platforms is making streaming live games on their platforms as commercially attractive as possible if it wants to compete with the traditional broadcast buck. Sharing the unparalleled audience data social platforms can generate is going to be crucial then, if the Premier League is going to strike a streaming deal independent of their match day broadcast partners, come renewal time.
With Premier League clubs being locked out of live streaming benefits until 2020, they must focus their immediate commercial attention on the ‘third wave’ of social media that is riding high RIGHT NOW. Social video.
Burst Insights recently introduced an Intelligence Report Series that shows clubs how they can start monetising their social video content straight away.
Here are two undeniable facts that have convinced us that sports clubs do not have to wait until live streaming deals are stuck to generate revenue from their social media content. The first is that sports clubs own the attention of their fans away from the live match experience. Fans crave continuous insight into their club and sports clubs are delivering it on a daily basis through social media and increasingly, social video. They are becoming media companies in their own right, often producing exclusive content that can’t be found anywhere else. The second is that outside of highlight footage restrictions in most sports, clubs are free from the content control of rights holders. The value -and revenue potential- of a sports club is not a byproduct of a pre-determined distribution model, created by their league rights holder and paid for by licensed broadcasters. When it comes to social media, it is the sports clubs who already have the attention of consumers that brands want exposure to.
To purchase our groundbreaking research report and pre-order next season’s edition, head to www.burstinsights.com or email me on simon@burstinsights.com
