Alistair Taylor | MIDiA Research

The Show Must Go On – NFL Throws Screen Pass at COVID-19 with NFL Draft

2 Apr 2020

The NFL’s commissioner Roger Goodell announced to all 32 teams in a memo on March 26th that the NFL draft will go ahead as scheduled from the 23 rd to 25 th of April, despite growing pressures resulting from COVID-19 to postpone the event.

min read

Olympics Postponement: The Sports Media Landscape of COVID-19

Alistair Taylor

26 Mar 2020

Advertising Revenue

broadcasters

business model

The global COVID-19 pandemic is increasing pressure on the viability of emerging and legacy media business models, and is already having an unprecedented impact on the sports industry. An unprecedented swathe of cancelled sports events has left rights holders unable to monetise their existing broadc...

min read

Sports Consumer Survey
Country Snapshots

Alistair Taylor

March 2020

Streaming

Video

Sport consumer survey

Sports Consumer Snapshots for the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, Sweden, France, Italy, Netherlands, and Mexico

Six Nations Behind a Paywall: Can Rugby Afford to Bench Free-To-Air?

Alistair Taylor

6 Mar 2020

business model

consumption habits

cricket

Six Nations organisers are reportedly considering awarding the exclusive distribution rights for its annual competition to pay-TV operator Sky, in an unprecedented £300 ($384) million deal. Organisers have said they ‘would not rule anything out’ as the Rugby Paper reported the championship woul...

min read

NFL's broadcast over-index flatters to deceive

Alistair Taylor

27 Feb 2020

Games

Innovation

Marketing

The NFL’s recently released viewing figures provided to CNBC highlighted a 5% increase in viewership as TV audiences grew on average to 16.5 million, up from 15.8 million in 2018. Not only this, but according to Quartz , throughout the season the NFL finished with 41 out of the top 50 broadcasts (...

min read

Tale of the tape: UFC or bundle driving ESPN+ adoption?

Alistair Taylor

11 Feb 2020

bundle

Disney

ESPN+

Walt Disney’s pureplay sports streaming service ESPN+, which launched back in April 2018, has surpassed 7.6 million paid subscribers, Disney ’s chief executive Bog Iger reported during last week’s earnings call.

min read

Sports Consumer Trends
The Sun Sets on Pay-TV Dominance

Alistair Taylor

February 2020

Amazon

Facebook

BBC

With subscription video on demand (SVOD) services surpassing pay-TV penetration en route to becoming a mainstream medium, sporting consumption habits have inherently changed. Rights holders, broadcasters, streaming services and betting and gaming companies will all feel the impact of fast-changing consumption habits and new regional nuances.

Keeping with the Times: Sports Plays Catch-Up with Younger Digital Audiences

Alistair Taylor

27 Jan 2020

digital natives

e-sports

Gamers

Sports as a product is feeling the squeeze of the peak attention economy. Sports fans in the traditional sense are ageing, and appealing to a younger digitally-native audience is a fundamental issue that rights holders can no longer ignore.

min read

Peacock Goes for Gold

Alistair Taylor

23 Jan 2020

ad-free

All or Nothing

AMC

On the 16 th of January , Comcast (owner of NBCUniversal) unveiled further details of its direct to consumer (D2C) proposition, Peacock. Peacock is set to debut on the 15 th of April exclusively for Comcast’s Xfinity X1 and Flex customers, before being rolled out nationally across the US on July 1...

min read

‘If You Ain’t First, You’re Last’: Revenue-Over-Reach Argument Not Refuted for F1

Alistair Taylor

9 Jan 2020

audience viewership

average age

BARB

2019 audience figures for Formula One (F1) provide the latest example of a rights holder opting for short-term revenue optimisation over long-term strategic growth, to the detriment of its viewing audience.

min read

Can BT Lay the Smackdown on Its Rivals?

Alistair Taylor

3 Jan 2020

addressable audience

broadcast

BT

This Saturday at 1am GMT BT will debut its live broadcast for WWE Smackdown, having acquired the exclusive rights from long-term UK broadcaster Sky in June 2019 . This signalled the end of Sky’s tenure as the home of WWE content, which first began broadcasting wrestling coverage to fans back in th...

min read

Amazon One - Family Christmas Nil

Alistair Taylor

18 Dec 2019

addressable audience

AFC Bournemouth

ageing audience

Ever since the English Premier League (EPL) awarded rights to tech major Amazon in June 2018, the excitement for December 2019 and how Amazon’s live stream delivery would pan out has been palpable. The EPL has long prioritised revenue over reach when entertaining rights bids, but this legacy appro...

min read

20/20 Vision
MIDiA Research Predictions 2020

Alistair Taylor, Amanda Stears, Karol Severin, Keith Jopling, Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan and Zach Fuller

December 2019

Apple

Spotify

Discovery

In this report MIDiA Research analysts present their predictions for what will be the big trends in digital media and tech across music, video, media, brands, marketing, games and sports in 2020 and the coming decade. Companies and brands mentioned in...

US and UK Sports Fans
Reaching Digital Natives

Alistair Taylor

December 2019

YouTube

Amazon

revenue

Sports as a product is feeling the squeeze of the peak attention economy. Sports fans in the traditional sense are ageing, and appealing to a younger digitally-native audience is a fundamental issue that rights holders can no longer ignore. Sports rights holders have realised the importance of their virtual (gaming) counterparts, acknowledging that...

BT Sport’s Key Ingredient for Competing in an Increasingly Saturated Landscape

Alistair Taylor

22 Nov 2019

American football

basketball

broadcast audience

The strategic dilemma as to whether rights holders should seek revenue over reach when allocating domestic rights is inevitably impacted by how dependent services are on premium rights for securing subscriber revenue.

min read

Disney+ Recovers From Initial Blunder to Surpass 10 Million Sign Ups on Debut!

Alistair Taylor

14 Nov 2019

21st Century Fox

all-encompassing offering

AppleTV+. Market saturation

Disney claims unexpected traffic on its newly-launched service was at fault for the buffering and technical issues of Disney+’s launch Tuesday . The issues highlight just how difficult it is transitioning from a media company to a tech player, with technical glitches an enormous issue for digital-...

min read

NFL Adding Music to Its Playbook

Alistair Taylor

4 Nov 2019

archived footage

audio content

curated playlists

The NFL continues expanding its reach with the news that it is providing both video and audio content to global streaming services Spotify and Tidal. This follows the NFL’s recently- announced partnerships with social platforms TikTok, Reddit, Facebook and YouTube.

min read

Sports Rights
Measuring the ROI for Streaming

Alistair Taylor

October 2019

Subscriptions

Amazon

subscribers

Measuring streaming sports audience engagement is paramount when determining which rights mix consumers are actually willing to pay for. Netflix has shown that in a saturated market, retaining consumer attention can cost twice as much as it did previously to retain the same level of user engagement.

Recession Impact
How an Economic Downturn Could Reshape Digital Media

Alistair Taylor, Amanda Stears, Karol Severin, Keith Jopling, Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan and Zach Fuller

October 2019

Apple

Spotify

Amazon

Ten years on from the credit crunch, the global economy could be poised to enter another economic recession. Many of the underlying causes of the credit crunch remain in place, due to governments lacking the appetite for the structural reform required to right the faults in the global financial system that catalysed the slowdown.

The NFL and Pizza Hut: Future-Proofing with E-Sports

Alistair Taylor

18 Oct 2019

ad responsiveness

addressable audience

advert experimentation

While sharing pizza has already become synonymous with watching sports, e-sports could be about to leverage that same instilled behaviour. Restaurant chain Pizza Hut made history this July when it became the first brand to secure naming rights for a virtual football stadium in an agreement with Madd...

min read