Internet and Sports
BY MAUREEN FLORES
The acquisition of television rights is the area that most moves resources in the sports economy. For example, broadcasting rights for the 2018 and 2022 Winter Games and the Summer Games of 2020 and 2024 has been sold by the International Olympic Committee for U $ 1 billion to the Japanese NHK and the Japan Television Association. It is expected that the return on large investments such as that assumes the existence of a legion of fans translated into a large audience. However, large audiences are only available at mega-events or "mass" sports such as football, soccer, basketball and a few others.
Well, fortunately, the technology has arrived to change that as now any sport can have international coverage. The solution of the moment was developed by the Canadian company, Yare, where three partners invested U$ 300,000, approximately to develop a platform to transmit any sport activity.
It works like that: Yare requests to the sport federation an authorization to transmit their content. Based on this authorization, Yare record, stores in the cloud and broadcasts the event online, real time, over the Internet; accesses are sold around the world in territories pre-defined by the customer. The net revenues generated are divided half-way with the federation. A good example is Curling, a winter sport that does not have millions of fans around the world, but was able to attract 11,235 people outside Canada to visit the site; including 17 accesses sold in Brazil, the only country in South America. The price of access to attend the Curling tournament ranged from U $ 70 (for the season) to U $ 20 (one tournament). Thus, the rights' holder extended their reach without investing a penny.
Another example is Canadian football, which Yare transmitted to 100 countries (except Canada) reaching 24,695 fans, including 18 Brazilians. The events were sold for U$ U$9.95 per game and U$ 29.95 per package of events. Prices vary: the higher the audience, the lower the price.
The company also monitors all accesses from its audience. In the case of Canadian football, 70% watched the game by cell phone, 25% on desktop and tablets were used by 5% of the audience. Facebook is the leader among the use of social midia. The predominance of cell phone use confirms the studies of trend analysts who point to mobile phones as the great entertainment vehicle of this generation. In its business model, the Canadian company works with large TV stations. Some of these important channels, which have a higher operational cost , hire Yare to cover some territories reducing their transmission costs.
The technology used by Yare is OTT, the same one that allows us to speak by Skype, watch Netflix and enjoy other services offered by the internet. Other competitors are already on the market; Some are large, such as NeuLion, and others more specialized, such as Fubotv. However, this Canadian company represents the second generation of OTT solutions for sports broadcasting and therefore, as determined by the "laws" that govern technological development, its services are faster, cheaper and more effective.
In Brazil, there is great potential in the use of OTT for broadcasting sports that do not reach the large audience required by open and cable tvs; for example, Beach Soccer, Skating, Muay Thai and others. The challenge is Brazilian internet infrastructure that, in demands such as that, will often require additional equipments for bandwidth and signal redundance. The cost of such equipments increase the operational costs and reduce the net revenue. Even so, it is possible to have a profitable Brazilian operation. In fact, Brazilian sport federations used to manage scarce public resource and compete fiercely for private sponsorship should study the new possibilities of financial sustainability offered by the internet.
EMAIL: [email protected]
Originally Published in Portuguese by O Globo
blogs.oglobo.globo.com/esporte-e-inovacao/
MARCH 28TH, 2017