Reports: live sports

This case study is partnered with the report “Beyond broadcast | How digital natives will reboot sports content monetisation”, accessible to subscribers here ....

Global broadcast deals are being renegotiated in the context of expiring rights, evolving digitally native, younger audience engagement and increased competition for attention. With only 6% of 16-19-year-olds watching live sport across OTT platforms and linear TV, Gen Z is slowly finding new ways to engage with sports through social media highlights and fantasy sports.

This slide deck presents sports fan consumer demand, covering video services, live TV sports viewing, sports highlight viewing, free live digital sports viewing, device viewing, sports betting, fantasy sports penetration, TV genre preferences, and sports type preferences.

COVID-19 exposed live entertainment as a vulnerable asset class during a global health crisis, rendering services overly reliant on live sports broadcasts as primary churn candidates. A major overhaul in rights valuations by pay-TV and sports SVOD distributors is under way.

The postponement of annual competitions and major quadrennial events has highlighted just how heavily pay-TV and sport-centric streaming services’ value propositions rely on live sports. Filling schedules with re-runs, docuseries, interviews and archived footage are stopgaps unlikely to increase engagement.

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.

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.

The 13.2% dip on the 2019–2022 English Premier League (EPL) rights deals compared to the 2015-2018 deal highlighted the decline in value for sports broadcast rights. In light of this downturn and a fall in the consumption of sports content on traditional linear TV, moves are being made into the subscription video on demand (SVOD) space, with Disney’s new direct-to-consumer flagship sports SVOD service ESPN+ leading the charge.