It's an epic battle: Sports Broadcasters vs Tech Challengers

For the past couple of decades, legacy sports broadcasters sure have had a good innings. Players such as NBC/CBS/ESPN in the United States, ITV/BBC/Sky in the UK and Supersport in Africa have functioned as monopolies whilst outbidding any smaller media challenger and ensuring customers stayed tied into their pay-TV ecosystem.

I was recently in the States for the Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor fight and was taken aback by the inaccessibility of this event to the general public.  

My choices were either:

1. Pay a fortune for pay-per-view access from a local monopoly (I mean provider).
2. Pay a fortune to sit in a cramped downtown pub while drinking their overpriced drinks.

The same story rings true across much of the globe, either via pay-per-view models or premium subscription services.

In South Africa, for example, should you wish to watch your beloved local football team, the English Premier League or the country's national cricket/rugby team, you would need to fork out around R1,000/month ($80) to the countries pay-TV monopoly of DSTV. Many a challenger has come and gone in the country over the years and there appeared a vast moat protecting their offering - across the globe, similar such players have enjoyed the same spoils.

Until now...

The new challengers come in the form of technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google.

The great irony is that these new players aren't so much worried about actual sport, nor the significant direct revenues associated with it - for them, it's all about keeping people’s attention and eyeballs on advertising platforms - such as social media.

My first experience in such disruption of media by a tech player (that moment when the coin dropped for me) was the 2016 U.S. election. As I logged onto Twitter to check the poll results, I was pleasantly surprised to find a free live streaming BuzzFeed news channel on the platform. As a result, Twitter not only captured but kept my full attention for my entire 45-minute commute to work - ultimately a win for me, win for Twitter, win for BuzzFeed and loss for legacy media players.

Back to the sports though and something which caught my attention in this battleground is the aggressive moves currently being made by Facebook - they are in the process of looking for a top-level executive to broker sports-rights deals – rumour has it that this person will be responsible for “a few billion dollars” targeting internet-only sports streaming deals.

Such a deal wouldn't so much be about showing every English Premier League or NFL game, but rather about bidding significant amounts of cash for key events - imagine being able to watch Manchester United vs Liverpool, or Floyd vs Conor (for free) via Facebook while you are sitting at your local Starbucks (on their free WiFi) or even at that family wedding during the two hours of speeches.

It is also worth mentioning Jeff Bezos' Amazon in this equation - as the battle for streaming TV emerges between Netflix and Amazon Prime, the company that started off as an eCommerce book website has made live sport a key differentiator on their video platform, starting with the reported $50m deal with the NFL which means that 200 countries around the world have been watching selected American Football games live on Amazon Prime Video since late September. It's believed that English Premier League football, as well as ATP World Tour tennis, are on their radar as well.

"We are going to see an increasing engagement from those organisations [Amazon and Facebook] and it is going to be increasingly important to digitally engage with fans." ~ Manchester United vice-chairman Ed Woodward

In closing, sports fans are living in exciting times where revolutionary new and disruptive business models funded by technology companies as a means to support their core businesses come up against traditional players and their one dimensional business models - it's an epic battle for the attention of millennials and generation Z - a battle to keep you from diverting your eyeballs to “that other app” - all at the expense of traditional broadcasters.