Sport : from consuming live to live consuming

Rights holders must be aware ! This is THE major shift in sport consumption since television. They must embrace that change and play with it.

For the last 4 decades sport was about live and TV. The whole rights business mode was built on these 2 pillars. BREAKING NEWS : it's over !

Live is of course still very important but is now only part of the story. Live still serves existing fans in the best scenario but will not allow Sport Organizations to grab new ones anymore. TV is of course great to have in the distribution mix as a visibility booster and for the lucky super premium rights owners still a great source of revenue. For 90 % of all the other sport properties (Tier 2 or "nice to have"), the gold rush belongs to the past. They are being kicked off one by one by networks. Double sentence : no rights fees and no production costs covered anymore.

Live is of course still very important but is now only part of the story.

Watching live sports has become an exception, not the rule. Fans will from now on only watch live sport in front of a screen when they can expect a peak moment in the season, top match of their favourite team or a Nadal/Federer summit.

They are naturally much more selective, just because mechanically they just do have less time to dedicate to live sport. No a lot left when spending 2 hours a day in average on social network, when 300 M people do spend 1 hour per day on Netflix or when 100 M teenagers do hang around 70 hours a week on Twitch !

As a consequence, fans consume sport differently on a daily basis.

Near Live, Athetes or Fans generated content from, within or even during a competition, on and off the pitch are now the most privileged ways for younger generations (and not only!) to stay connected in real time with sport. What was still complementary to Live 5 years ago is now, 80 % of the time, a real substitution. Snacking do serve most of the time sport fans' appetite. Live is only coming on top. The sport consumption pyramid has turned upside down !

We are clearly living the second revolution since sport on TV : from consumming live to live consumming.

One can be happy or not about that radical change, but this is the new reality and there is no way to ignore it. All indicators go the same way and show a structural trend.

Before the first lockdown in march 2020, live average ratings of all big sport franchises were down by 15 to 20 %. As you can imagine sports on hold for months, behind closed-doors events and disorder in the calendars didn't help since. NBA finals or US Open were around 40 % down...

I would like to mention here 2 very recent surveys from Morning Consult and PWC confirming that we are getting into a new era.

Live video content is only ranked 5 in what can expected in a near future and as you could expect GenZ (13 to 24) now watches live sport every week half as much as the Millenials (24-40) !

Don't be surprised if like Mediapro in France for football Ligue 1 you get super disappointed not to reach millions of subscribers paying 25 euros a month !!! It's for sure a complete misunderstanding of how people consume today and what they want. 70 % of the fans will watch a maximum of 10 matches live per season. They will certainly not spend that amount of money for such a unflexible package. Last but not least you are not talking to League's fans but to club's fans. That makes a big difference in the offer to be proposed.

I have realized in the last 2 years helping existing or new disruptive Leagues that digital fragmentation is not the ony reason why new generations tend to walk away for watching regularly live events.

It would be too simple and it would clear rights holders from their responsabilities. With the exception of US major sports, for all the other global sport organizations including European ones, the live experience didn't evolve fast enough to keep on engaging and rejuvenate the fan base.

By Live experience I mean format & rules. It's deeper that just a question of number of cameras, look & feel innovations, getting insight before and after the game. These were great evolutions from the "cable decades". TV did part of the the job but now comes the time of Sport Authorities to accelerate urgently the transformation. It's about rechallenging the "product" in itself. I know it's most ot the time very taboo, nevertheless...

Sport rules & format must kill downtimes and work on more intensity. Live experience should be also much more immersive. Technology is here. It's now in the hands of sport organizations to adapt the rules quickly to fit this new pace and allow immersion. You do not write and deliver a fiction series or a movie on Netfilx or HBO today the way it was produced in the seventies. Sometimes I feel like sport narrative is not so different today than what it was than 30 years ago. In the meantime, society has changed dramatically and e-sport has shaken the tree… Not a big surprise to look at the very ageeing traditional sport fan base (61 years old for tennis fan for instance !).

My experience working with International Swimming League or Ultimate Tennis Showdown is that professional sport is still a unique and fantastic playground and that the greatest Champions on the planet are keen on testing new formats and rules. More than that : they are having a blast ! I remember as Discovery Sport Content SVP being part of a meeting with USTA : we had a common request with ESPN for the US Open : to interview one player on court after each set. The answer was NO WAY. Players will never accept.

Have you watched and heard conversations between commentators and players at each change over during UTS matches ? Priceless ! Gamechanger ! and it's not rocket science ! It's just about changing habits.

VAR in Football is a missed opportunity in that aspect. Viewers are excluded from what's happening. Instead of creating a strong shared moment, fans are asked to wait at the door…Fan experience was cleary not in the equation when VAR was implemented.

Live sport product must deliver high intensity, unpredicatability and immersion.

Every single format and rules evolution must take these 3 parameters into consideration.

As just said working on the live experience is critical but unfortunately not enough. Near live content in every possible way is super important. The target here is really for rights holders is to evaluate that package properly and to keep as much freedom as possible to push that type of content on their owned media.

In all the distribution negociations I run with networks worldwide on behalf of rights holders, this is one of my priorities. A good deal with broadcasting partners is not only a question of fee. It's very much so a question of visibility and even more important a common understanding that the more near live content is pushed by all the stake holders, the better it is to nurrish fans and the funnel.

When a rights holder wants to be superactive on its onwed media, it should be perceived as a blessing for its networks partners and not as a competition or a cannibalisation risk.

"Live is now just a part of your story" That's how I start every presentation to a client. As a matter of fact, every solution, every proposition, every decision, every action will flow from that new reality. Simple, brutal, sometimes difficult to accept but an essential common prerequisite to move forward and work together on new narrative and distribution routes.

Arnaud Simon has created In&Out Stories collective in 2018 to help rights holders redefining and implementing a new narrative and distribution strategy. Major achievements so far with ISL, UTS, or the French Tennis Federation. Formely Eurosport France CEO and Discovery Sport Content & Production SVP for Europe.

In&Out Stories website