Reports: Audience engagement

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 they are taking much of the attention of a large proportion of their fanbases, but also nurturing expected future fans who do not interact with the real-life version of sports.

Sports-centric subscription video on demand (SVOD) services have largely struggled to entice subscribers, based on their current value propositions which consist mainly of niche rights. Pay-TV has the lion’s share of premium domestic sports rights, providing it with an advantageous set of assets partially justifying premium-priced contracts for its subscriber base.

The clock is ticking down to 2021 when the major domestic sports rights in the US and the UK will start coming up for renewal. Thus far, pureplay sports streaming video on demand (SVOD) services such as DAZN and Eleven Sports have experienced mixed fortunes.