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SportBusiness International Knowledge Centre

SPORT & DIGITAL MEDIA 2013-14

Published September 2014

© 2014 SportBusiness Group

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SportBusiness International Knowledge Centre 3

Sport & Digital Media 2013-14

Contents

Introduction ........................................................................................................... 4

1. Social video and exclusivity .............................................................................. 5

2.1 BallBall: News Corp’s European football clips experiment in Asia ........ 9

2.2 News Corp on BallBall ......................................................................................... 11

3.1 NFL pushes video via Twitter to drive traditional channels ................... 13

3.2 NFL on its Twitter Amplify partnership ......................................................... 16

4.1 The NBA’s short-form content strategy ......................................................... 20

4.2 NBA on its media rights sales strategy ......................................................... 22

5. NFL goes it alone as leagues push out short-form content ................... 25

6. Premier League targets ISPs to block pirated live streams in UK ......... 28

7. Sport ‘slow to exploit smart TV’ ........................................................................ 30



to the delivery of sports media via internet-connected and mobile devices, as opposed to traditional television and radio platforms. The platforms are increasingly converging, in terms of the way media rights are sold and products for the consumer are packaged. But we feel that there is still enough going on around the development of internet and mobile products, separately from the traditional platforms, to warrant a standalone report.

The articles within are mostly adapted from stories in the TV Sports Markets newsletter. TV Sports Markets is SportBusiness Group’s specialist media division. The report also contains an exclusive feature on the use of video on social media platforms.

As with all SportBusiness International Knowledge Centre reports, Sport & Digital Media 2013-14 is also available as a series of website articles on the Knowledge Centre site http://www.sportbusiness.com/knowledge-centre/search.

This report is designed to bring readers up to date with some of the biggest developments in sport and digital media in the period from July 2013 to July 2014.

Topics covered include the NFL’s ground-breaking use of Twitter’s Amplify programme, the opportunities being missed with internet-connected TV sets, and the ongoing fallout from the European Court of Justice’s 2011 ruling in the English Premier League’s case against English publican Karen Murphy.

These stories of course represent only a fraction of the developments in the last year in this incredibly fast-moving sector. It would impossible to cover them all in depth. But we feel this selection will arm readers with insight into cutting-edge strategies and important trends that will assist them no matter where they work in the sports business.

We use the phrase “digital media” in this report in relation

Introduction

Currency figures within were calculated using exchange rates contemporary to the original articles. For the exclusive feature beginning on page 5, the rates used were £1 = €1.25, £1 = $1.67.

http://www.sportbusiness.com/knowledge-centre/search



exclusivity for broadcasters. It may be a difficult transition for some, as the pay-off is not in direct revenue.

As one media rights agency executive said: “I’m not convinced that there is a pot of gold at the end of this. It’s about driving audience and driving a younger viewership.”

There are as yet no definitive models for how best to use video on social media. Those that emerge are expected to vary according to the sport and the market. One thing the experts SportBusiness International spoke to agreed upon was that closer cooperation between sports and broadcasters was required to produce the best results.

“Sports rights-holders need to work with broadcasters to put more video on social media, to drive engagement for broadcasters’ coverage and to drive engagement for younger viewers. Everyone needs to work in cooperation with each other,” one said.

NFL takes initiativeAmerican football’s NFL has been one of the big early movers, distributing valuable near-live clips for free on Twitter, via the social media platform’s Amplify programme.

“We are watching where our fans are spending their time and we want to be in those places and on those platforms as they emerge,” Hans Schroeder, senior vice president of media strategy at the NFL, told SportBusiness International’s sister-service TV Sports Markets.

The clips included in-game and post-match highlights. The tweets containing the clips were designed to steer Twitter users towards revenue-generating NFL media products, such as television broadcasts, the NFL website and the NFL’s direct-to-consumer video products (see article, page 13).

The increasing importance of video clips on social media is nibbling at the edges of the traditional notion of exclusive sports media rights deals.

Clips of action from sports events are highly compelling for social media users, and so very useful for sports properties in promoting themselves to the millions-strong and young audiences on social media.

But the best video has traditionally been sold in exclusive deals, to give media rights partners the best shot at recovering their spend on the rights.

Sports rights-holders will have to address the question in upcoming sales of their media rights, which are for many their biggest source of income. How do they tap into the massive social media audiences using video, without undermining the media rights revenue stream?

Industry experts SportBusiness International spoke to believe that the future holds more free video online, and some loosening of the traditional idea of absolute

1. Social video and exclusivityBy Kevin McCullagh

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from its editorial teams. As one UK rights expert put it, “If News Corp can’t make it work, no one can.”

The company is entering the second season of its three-season deal and it’s not yet clear how successful the strategy has been. It is paying the league £12m (€15m/$20m) per season for the rights.

Different routesHow different sports properties eventually use social video will vary, experts say, depending on factors including their resources and in-house skills, and the markets they and their broadcasters operate in.

It will also vary from sports property to sports property whether they or their broadcast partners have the expertise to take the lead in deciding what video should be used for engagement, and what sold as exclusive rights.

Some sports properties have the resources and expertise, either in-house or at an agency partner, to decide such strategy and produce high-quality clips for internet audiences. For others, their broadcast partners might be in a better position to promote the property even on social media, due to having a bigger audience. This could even be the case for a major sports property, for example when trying to enter a new market.

As William Field put it, “The marketing – reach and engagement – goals can also be achieved by allowing broadcast licence-holders to do the same. They can be good at promoting your content and sport by using video clips online.”

Another factor dictating whether properties or broadcasters take the lead in social video strategy could be broadcasters’ willingness to spend resources developing social video. They may be prepared to do so for flagship properties, but not smaller sports in their portfolio.

At Spanish football club Barcelona, the belief is that so long as broadcasters continue to develop their media products, they will be in the driving seat in terms of the model for how this content should be exploited.

“Broadcasters will have the mass audience and the advertising/PPV capabilities for a long time if they evolve

The NFL was in a relatively unusual position in being able to use clips in this way because it had kept back some valuable online video rights in its most recent round of deals with broadcasters.

William Field, a sports media consultant at Prospero Strategy, told SportBusiness International: “I think that the NFL’s approach is absolutely the right one to take, where you can do that. Social media is not primarily about revenue – it’s about reach and engagement – and if you can offer video that is going to be engaging.”

Old ways can payEnglish football’s Premier League has made considerable revenue for over a decade by taking the traditional approach of selling fully exclusive domestic rights to online video clips of its matches. It couldn’t copy the NFL’s approach without endangering this revenue stream.

But there have always been questions over the value of the rights as a standalone package. No buyer has ever been able to make a highly successful product out of it, and the league’s revenue from it has waxed and waned.

Current rights-holder News Corp, the rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper publisher, is considered by many to be making the best use of the clips to date. It is selling them as part of a subscription to its UK newspaper titles – the video is packaged with high quality written and statistical analysis

“I’m not convinced that there is a pot of gold at the end of this. It’s about driving

audience and driving a younger viewership”



The view from FC BarcelonaQ&A with Manel Arroyo, FC Barcelona vice-president, media and communications.

1. Do you think broadcasters and sports organisations need to distribute more video for free online, instead of giving everything exclusively to broadcasters? Is a rethink required in the traditional way of doing business?Clubs’ and sport organisations’ video distribution policies must serve their strategic objectives. To maximize value, the bigger part of the rights must go to broadcasters that have larger audiences and, more importantly, bigger opportunities to monetise the content.

However, there’s always remaining content that can be produced and distributed directly to serve other objectives, like engagement in social media and direct monetisation.

2. What do you think the model for the future is?Currently, clubs and sports organisations tend to have big social media audiences. This gives them the opportunity to reach an audience that a few years ago was impossible to imagine; to distribute content directly to their fans; to get engagement and registered users; and to monetise directly (content) or indirectly (other products).

This audience is still too incipient to be valuable in terms of content monetisation compared to broadcasters’ businesses. Broadcasters will have the mass audience and the advertising/pay-per-view capabilities for a long time if they evolve digitally as the fans demand.

3. Do these changes in any way pose a threat to the business models of broadcasters?Clearly we are in front of huge challenges derived from new devices, new audience behaviour, content on-

demand and in the cloud, and targeted advertising.What we really see is that broadcasters are becoming

stronger and they are evolving their models to what the market demands.

4. Does this require a change in how rights are packaged and sold by sports? rights packages will evolve [as] the needs of broadcasters and sports organisations change. They have been changing in the past and will change in the future, but it’s true that nowadays the audience behaviour is changing fast.

5. Do you think that because of the above changes, plus the ease with which clips are pirated, paid-for clips models are doomed?We lived this situation in the past with music and movies. If you provide a good service for a good price, you can beat the piracy.

In sports, additionally, you also have to provide the tools for the fans to voice their engagement and turn this into something valuable.

6. It has been said that advertising revenues around mobile video are rising, and have great potential. Do you see this?Mobile video advertising will become more popular because of the increasing penetration of devices and the faster network connections. This will drive in higher audiences but probably not higher CPMs (revenue per thousand viewers). There are huge video audiences with very low CPMs.

Probably the highest CPMs will come with targeted advertising using users’ profiles that will be created by social graph, CrMs (Customer relationship Management databases), content consumption, etc.



digitally as the fans demand,” Manel Arroyo, the club’s vice-president, media and communications, told SportBusiness International (see panel, page 5).

Advertising potentialSocial video can in theory deliver advertising revenue as well as audience engagement. But for most rights-holders this advertising revenue is at present tiny. In 2013, sports media experts told TV Sports Markets that advertising around online video was generating between £5 and £15 per 1,000 viewers.

Increasing penetration of smartphones is increasing the audience for social video, and industry experts are cautiously optimistic that this will eventually lead to stronger advertising revenues.

“A big problem at the moment is that the ad market is not developed enough around video,” one agency executive said. “Mobile will make it all happen. Users are migrating from desktop to mobile video.”

Manel Arroyo at Barcelona said: “There are huge video audiences with very low CPMs [revenue per thousand viewers]. Probably the highest CPMs will come with targeted advertising using users’ profiles that will be created using social graph, CrMs [Customer relationship Management databases], content consumption, etc.” Social graph refers to information about users’ interests gleaned from their social media activities.

The NFL is reported to have generated much stronger revenues than suggested above by selling sponsorship around its Twitter Amplify partnership. US advertising industry magazine Adweek reported that the league had earned more than $10m (€7.6m) from the partnership in the 2013 season, after a revenue share with Twitter. Brands including McDonald’s, Verizon and Microsoft signed up as sponsors.

Ever-present threatIncreasing piracy of clips on services such as social video platform Vine poses a challenge for paid-for models, but only enhances fan engagement, experts say.

The Premier League in August 2014 warned its fans against uploading clips of goals unofficially on services like Vine. UK clips rights partner News Corp clearly has a lot to lose from this activity.

One expert SportBusiness International spoke to said preventing the uploading of such content was “impossible”. However, experts believe in the value of high-quality clips-based products that, if good enough, can trump the unofficial sources of clips.

“The value should be around the quality of the meta-data around the content,” William Field said. rights-buyers should also seek to demonstrate their official relationship with the rights-holder, and the benefits that that was bringing for the user, he said.



UK experienceNews Corp had experience in monetising sports clips. In the UK, it is using exclusive football clips to drive subscription revenues for its newspapers, which are adding digital content to combat declining print revenues.

BallBall’s business model is different. News Corp had no existing customer base in the Asian markets on which to build. The project is not about managing the print-to-digital transition but about creating revenue where previously none existed.

The BallBall app is free to customers and is monetised by selling pre-roll and post-roll adverts around the clips, and through sponsorship. Chrysler’s Jeep brand was an early sponsor.

Greenberg said that in markets where News had no existing customer base, it made sense to launch a free service to build volume.

“The UK and Asia are clearly very different territories. In the UK, News has a well-established infrastructure and

Original TV Sports Markets article published August 2013

rupert Murdoch-owned publisher News Corp last year took aim at what it claimed was a growing market of smartphone-owning, time-poor Asian football fans with video clips product BallBall.

BallBall, launched in August 2013, is a free mobile and tablet application and website with video clips and news from European club football. Its videos cover the big five European football leagues (see panel, page 10), and also covered the 2014 World Cup. Its news includes editorial content from News Corp newspapers, such as the UK’s The Sun, The Times, and The Sunday Times. BallBall is currently available in Japan, Vietnam and Indonesia, each of which has a local-language edition.

News Corp told TV Sports Markets it believed the product would work due to its uniqueness and changing lifestyles in the targeted markets.

“We are bringing a new concept to the market which has never been attempted before, combining rich editorial expertise and content with rich video content,” Simon Greenberg, head of global rights at News Corp, said. “The two sit very naturally together along with rich data analysis and social media innovation. And we think we can make that work.

“We are aware of the history behind clip rights but we think we are coming with a very different proposition to anything previously.”

There are few precedents for a successful subscription product based on sports video clips. But News was convinced that growing smartphone penetration in Asia would radically change the dynamics of the clips market. This would be aided by changes in lifestyles, with people having less time to watch long-form entertainment.

2.1 BallBall: News Corp’s European football clips experiment in Asia

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Although the company lacked a presence in the three markets, it enjoyed a major advantage in having no real competitor in the region.

At the rights acquisition stage, it faced competition from agencies and broadcasters, while on the ground there are numerous football websites. Nobody, however, offered rich video content with coverage by top football writers. Broadcasters, which represent theoretical rivals for eyeballs, were not competitors either, News believed.

huge customer base behind it. If we had businesses like The Sun and The Times to work off in Asia, it might have been a different model.”

Growth marketsJapan, Indonesia and Vietnam were chosen for their levels of economic and digital maturity, and their potential for growth. Japan is the most mature market. Indonesia and Vietnam are developing rapidly.

The rights that got BallBall rollingAt launch, BallBall offered video clips of: England’s Premier League, FA Cup, Championship and League Cup; Italy’s Serie A; Germany’s Bundesliga; France’s Ligue 1; Brazil’s Série A; and Major League Soccer from North America.

For the Premier League, News Corp has both in-game and post-match clip rights in Indonesia, and post-match clip rights in Japan and Vietnam. The clips can be accessed from midnight UK time on the day of the match.

For all other properties in all three territories, News has only post-match clip rights.

In order to put together the content, News had to strike deals with the MP & Silva agency, the English Premier League and the German Bundesliga (see original TV Sports Markets story (Volume 17, Issue 15) for details of how each property was acquired http://www.sportbusiness.com/news-corps-dramatic-clips-venture). The deals for the Premier League rights are for 2013-14 to 2015-16, and for all other properties are for 2013-14 and 2014-15.

News Corp acquired 2014 Fifa World Cup clip rights in Vietnam for BallBall in a last-minute deal – finalised two hours before the tournament kicked off – with the

MP & Silva agency. The rights covered three minutes of action per match, which it was allowed to show for up to an hour after the game took place, as well as round-ups and themed content segments. News Corp paid about $50,000 for the rights.

BallBall’s traffic during the World Cup group stage is understood to have been double that for the climax of the 2013-14 European club football season.

TV Sports Markets estimates the cost of the European club football clip rights across the three Asian markets to be about $8m (€6m) over three years. The Premier League rights account for the bulk of this.

This was a relatively modest investment compared to what News paid for clip rights in the UK. It paid about £12m (€14m/$19m) per season in a three-year deal for Premier League clips, covering 2013-14 to 2015-16. It is thought to have paid under £1m per season for the rights to the FA Cup and England national team matches from 2014-15 to 2017-18. News is also providing the rights-holder – the English Football Association – with value in kind through promotional campaigns in its newspapers for the FA Cup.

http://www.sportbusiness.com/news-corps-dramatic-clips-venture

http://www.sportbusiness.com/news-corps-dramatic-clips-venture



any existing customer base it made sense to go for a volume-based free service in the short to medium term.

The UK and Asia are clearly very different territories. In the UK, News has a well-established infrastructure and huge customer base behind it. If we had businesses like The Sun and The Times to work off in Asia, it might have been a different model.

Can you explain how Jeep became a sponsor of the BallBall app?It was hugely encouraging to have a company of Jeep’s global status as a launch partner. They clearly saw the potential and uniqueness of BallBall and have a long history in football.

We are talking to several companies and all of them have the same reaction that a one-stop shop of all the European football highlights is something their customers in Asia are interested in.

For a project of this nature, do you have any direct competitors in Asia?Asia is a very competitive and crowded digital market with different propositions and there were others interested in the rights.

There are many football websites but none of them can offer what BallBall can offer. The proposition of premium video clips content, combined with premium written content taken from The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times and across Europe, is unique. So in that sense there is no direct competitor.

Are you in competition with local broadcasters?We don’t see ourselves in competition with local

Original interview published August 2013

Why did you choose Japan, Indonesia and Vietnam? And why start with only three countries?The three markets were chosen strategically for their various levels of economic and digital maturity and potential for growth. Japan is obviously a mature market. Indonesia is regarded by many as one of the key emerging markets of the world. And Vietnam, while in a different state of development, is also a very interesting market for the future.

What all three have in common is that News Corp had little, if any, existing infrastructure or customer base in these markets.

Therefore, this was a dramatic, innovative and ambitious project from the start in all three territories, very much in keeping with the philosophy and spirit of the new company.

Was there any link between your strategy and the clips deals signed in the UK by News UK (News Corp’s UK subsidiary)?We were hugely encouraged by the purchase of the Premier League rights in the UK by News UK. We felt that that the combination of premium video content and premium written content on digital platforms was a concept that was exportable to other territories which are similarly football mad.

The UK model is to put the content behind a pay-wall. In Asia, it is a free, ad-funded model. Why the difference?Our view was that in these markets where we didn’t have

2.2 News Corp on BallBallInterview with Simon Greenberg, global head of rights, News Corp



The trajectory of smartphone penetration in Asia over the next three to five years is such that the dynamics of the clips market has changed. People also have less time to watch sport. BallBall is a one-stop shop of European football highlights that you can watch on your way to work or over the breakfast table.

We are bringing a new concept to the market which has never been attempted before, combining rich editorial expertise and content with rich video content. The two sit very naturally together along with rich data analysis and social media innovation. And we think we can make that work.

We are aware of the history behind clip rights but we think we are coming with a very different proposition to anything previously.

Do you have plans to expand beyond the three territories where you are launching?It’s really early days. This project has been put together very quickly. It is very much a start-up project with a start-up mentality. We are not thinking about expansion at this moment. The project will evolve over the next few months with a full consumer launch and campaigns.

We will wait and see what the future holds but we are very much concentrating on these three territories.

broadcasters. We believe the live broadcaster in each market should work with us in partnership to promote the leagues as that benefits us all. We are not a broadcaster and we are not interested in live streaming.

We don’t have their expertise and they don’t have ours in terms of written content which complements clips packages so well. They should see us as a partner, not a threat.

Why did you launch on Android before iPhone?Given the speed with which BallBall was conceived and executed we just had to make some choices on priorities according to the markets and overall Android was the initial priority. We have a roadmap to roll out the other operating systems and platforms.

You say that you will soon be adding stats to the service. How will that work?rich data and analytics will be a major part of BallBall. We will be partnering with clever, innovative people in this space. That is the future of the sports data market as the raw data itself is becoming commoditised. We hope to develop new and innovative ways of looking at stats and in-game probability-based data.

Why will BallBall work when just about everybody else has failed to make money with clip rights?

“The trajectory of smartphone penetration in Asia over the next three to five years is such that

the dynamics of the clips market has changed”



200m (now 271m) active users were in the US and NFL research suggested that there were about 200m people in the country who considered themselves fans of the NFL.

“There is a lot of conversation happening around the NFL on Twitter outside of the people who already follow our account,” Schroeder said. “We are going to reach more of our addicts but we also hope to see more of the casual fans who might not know there is a game on Thursday night – now they see some highlights and they tune in.”

As a global platform, Twitter was also viewed as a way of attracting both the passionate and casual fans around the world to NFL media products.

“Internationally, because of the time zones and the geography, it’s hard to replicate that really strong communal aspect. One of the things about a social media platform, and us being more interactive, is that we can really bring our fans together,” Schroeder said.

“It brings the community element which is complementary to watching the game itself. So it’s not

Original TV Sports Markets article published October 2013

American football’s National Football League (NFL) began distributing exclusive clips via Twitter in 2013 in a move designed to encourage take-up of other NFL media such as live television coverage.

Near-live, in-match clips were published on the NFL Twitter feed, under an experimental one-season deal between the rights-holder and the social media platform.

NFL and Twitter agreed to share advertising revenues from the clips, and pre-sales of the inventory reportedly brought in about $10m.

In June 2014, the two organisations were reported to be in talks to renew the deal after a successful first season http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/nfl-says-it-s-champ-twitters-amplify-program-158646.

The deal was one of the early partnerships in Twitter’s Amplify [Hyperlink underlined word to: https://business.twitter.com/en-gb/twitter-amplify ] programme, under which media companies can get better promotion and profile for the images and videos they are sharing.

For the NFL, the wider goal was pushing the large numbers of fans talking about the league on Twitter towards its media products. Hans Schroeder, the league’s senior vice president of media strategy, told TV Sports Markets that the deal would “drive back more tune-in and more engagement with content on our other media assets, whether it is our [broadcast] partners’ games, the NFL Network, NFL.com or NFL Mobile. It can give a lift to our entire portfolio of assets.”

The NFL had over 5m followers of its official Twitter account (this has since risen to over 7m), which delivers news and match reports. There was considered to be huge potential to expand this number. About half of Twitter’s

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3.1 NFL pushes video via Twitter to drive traditional channels

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http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/nfl-says-it-s-champ-twitters-amplify-program-158646



of those deals was making sure we kept the rights to do things like this for all our games.”

Despite having digital rights to all games, however, the in-match highlights on Twitter only covered Thursday night games, which are shown by the NFL Network. There was no in-match content from the games carried by ESPN, NBC, CBS, Fox or DirecTV.

This was because the league “wanted to test a little bit what the best experience” was before expanding coverage. “We will do that around our games first to make sure we are smart and know the best execution,” Schroeder said.

“As we get smarter and know exactly how to maximise that, then we will look to roll that out down the road. We wanted an evolution in our approach, not to completely flip everything upside down from day one.”

Obstacles to social videoWilliam Field, of the Prospero Strategy consultancy, and former adviser to English football’s Premier League on new technologies, said that social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook would increasingly become vehicles for sports video, but that there were obstacles to its rapid development because of the way most sports audiovisual rights were packaged and sold.

While digital carve-outs are common among the big US leagues, they are more complicated for European rights-holders. Twitter and Facebook are global platforms so can work well where global rights to the clips have been retained by the rights-holder or are held by a single intermediary.

Where geo-blocking is required, the “Twitter or Facebook routes become more complicated,” he said.

Nevertheless, this and other recent developments in the way sports clips are monetised demonstrates that their importance is increasing and is likely to be reflected in changes to rights packaging in the next cycle of deals, over the next three to five years, he said.

“The money from digital clips is still very small compared to what broadcasters are paying for live,” Field said, “so sports bodies will still face the problem: why give ourselves

just about getting to the avid first fan, but the reach of the second fan.”

Keeping the Tweets prominentHaving a formal distribution deal, rather than simply using its Twitter account like a normal user, enabled the NFL to benefit from a more active exploitation of the content by Twitter. As part of the deal, Twitter promoted the NFL tweets at the top of users’ feeds, to ensure they were seen by large numbers of users.

As Schroeder put it, “real time is great, but for high-traffic moments when there is a lot of conversation it can be tough to catch all of the activity.

“This is a great way to make sure that people don’t miss some of these rich highlights or updates or other things you want to push out through the platform. We thought that was a great area where Twitter was bringing value to the partnership.”

Retained rights help NFLThe strategy will not always be straightforward for other rights-holders to copy. The NFL was able to offer attractive in-match clips as it had stripped digital short-form rights for some matches out of its broadcast contracts in the US and around the world.

The NFL could have been forgiven for playing safe and doing platform-neutral deals to protect its main partners. Domestic broadcast income will be about $7bn (€5.2bn) per season from 2014, according to Forbes magazine. The league also has a mobile rights deal with Verizon Wireless worth $250m per season.

But in 2009 and 2011, when the NFL embarked on renegotiations of its main broadcast deals, it carved out two sets of rights: for the NFL redZone, a digital channel offering real-time highlights of Sunday afternoon games; and in-match highlights of all games for its digital platforms such as NFL.com or NFL Mobile.

Schroeder said that when the NFL came to renegotiate these deals, “the world was already moving towards an expectation of on-demand content. An important part



Markets and Kantar Media, 25 per cent of US sports fans used social networks to access sports content. Of those, 77 per cent used Facebook, 47 per cent used youTube and 33 per cent Twitter.

a headache with the operators who are delivering nearly all of our income?

“There can be win-wins but broadcasters will need to be convinced that clip coverage on social media and other platforms is a form of promotion for their own content. Only a strong and forward-looking rights-holder can have that conversation and manage the rights in a way that looks at the full picture,” he added.

Avoiding cannibalisationThe NFL said its track record suggested that digital initiatives like the Twitter deal tended to boost traditional television audiences, and not undermine the value of exclusive broadcast deals.

Schroeder said that since carving out the rights for the redZone channel and for mobile and internet platforms, the NFL had seen “incremental consumption around both of those assets and both of those sets of rights, as well as an overall growth in our TV ratings.”

He said: “When we take these decisions we try to weigh all sides of the scale to make sure we are not increasing consumption here but cannibalising it on the other side. We ask: how do we lift everything?”

Any new content distribution had to be “additive” to the entire business. “That’s our mindset in how we attack everything. We want to be sure we are not just creating new consumption that shifts people; we want to create more overall consumption.”

Twitter v FacebookThe NFL did not rule out deals with other social media operators like Facebook. “We are watching where our fans are spending their time and we want to be in those places and on those platforms as they emerge,” Schroeder said.

“There are different players in the social space and Facebook is significantly ramping up what they are doing to be that second-screen experience as a companion to television.”

According to the Global Sports Media Consumption report 2013, produced by the Perform Group, TV Sports

What the NFL put on TwitterThe NFL provided bespoke daily content to Twitter, including in-game highlights from the NFL Network’s Thursday Night Football and post-match highlights from other games. The tweets also carried links to news, analysis, fantasy football advice and voting from NFL Network and NFL.com.

The in-game highlights were about 30 seconds long, with pre-roll adverts of six to eight seconds. The deal covered the 2013 regular season and play-offs.

There were multiple sponsors of the content, including the NFL’s mobile partner Verizon.



and a big supporter and participant in this programme.The one-year term is really great to allow us to

experiment and to test and to get a lot smarter about how our fans want to experience content on the Twitter platform and how that can drive value back to the rest of our media business – everything from driving tune-in and viewership of our [televised] games, which we think it can absolutely deliver, to driving people into a deeper experience with NFL Mobile, where Verizon is our partner.

Our fans are increasingly spending their time engaging with mobile versions of our content and this is a great way to tease and drive our fans into that deeper experience on their phone.

In a landscape which changes so quickly, we wanted to make sure we were doing a big enough splash and delivering a great experience for our fans, but also short enough for us to be able to really understand the dynamics here and be able to react to that.

If it works in this first season, will it be the basis of a longer relationship with Twitter? Are you also looking into other social media platforms?There are different players in the social [media] space and Facebook is significantly ramping up what they are doing to be that second-screen experience as a companion to television.

We think that this is all incremental consumption, driving back more tune-in and more engagement with our content on our other media assets, whether it is our games and our [broadcast] partners’ games, or whether it’s the NFL Network, or NFL.com, or NFL Mobile.

It can give a lift to our entire portfolio of assets. you look

Original interview published October 2013

Your deal with Twitter is only for one year. Why is that?This is our first big splash into the social media space as part of an active partnership, rather than just using those platforms to reach our fans. We think that there are a number of ways that this can drive benefits. The great approach that Twitter and Verizon brought to this was the right mix.

We evaluate new platforms as new platforms emerge. We want to be smart in thinking about how we utilise those platforms to reach our fans in new places while still building all the other elements of our media business. This is the right way to do something big.

Twitter wanted to do something big with us and was really willing to be innovative and to break some eggs at their end. Verizon, our deep mobile partner, are behind it

3.2 NFL on its Twitter Amplify partnershipInterview with Hans Schroeder, senior vice president of media strategy, NFL

Hans Schroeder

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media platform and us being more interactive, is that we can really bring together our fans.

So if there’s a [Pittsburgh] Steelers’ game going on and they want to focus that conversation on Steelers fans, all of a sudden all the Steelers fans around the world have a very easy platform to start to have a conversation about that game.

If you’re in the UK you can comment on it, and someone else in Germany can comment on the same game. It brings the community element which is complementary to watching the game itself.

On a primary level it’s other Steelers fans talking about the game. On a secondary level, if I see people tweeting about a game, maybe I want to now watch the game. So it’s not just about getting to the avid first fan, but the reach of the second fan.

The content is easily shared, it’s easily exposed, it’s easy to push into the viral element. I know that what I am doing, my friends can see. We love that aspect, and internationally we continue to build momentum and this is a great way to build on that.

Did the success of the Oreo tweet* in the Superbowl have any impact on your assessment of the power and reach of the platform?That was a great reinforcement for the power of the Twitter platform but we had already realised its power. We had already stuck our toe in the water, so the deal announced last week was the culmination of a much longer dialogue with Twitter. We were already believers.

The great thing about this partnership with Twitter is that they are going to do things which amplify engagement with our content and makes sure it gets exposed more.

Because Twitter is so real-time, one of the things that can happen is that, unless you are on your feed shortly after

at the broader marketplace and where consumers and fans are going – they are spending more time on these platforms and for us it’s important to make sure we are engaging in that conversation.

We will continue to build our presence in the social media space. Twitter has been a great partner to date and we would hope that we could do bigger and better things with them down the road.

But there may be other extensions of social media that we want to drive. It is consumer driven. We are watching where our fans are spending their time and we want to be in those places and on those platforms as they emerge.

Is the priority a deeper engagement with existing fans or reaching out to new fans?The beauty of this is that it does both. On the domestic side, we have about 5-6m users of our NFL [Twitter] account. yet we know that there are 100m US users of Twitter. And we know that there are about 200m people in this country which are fans of the NFL.

So clearly, there is a lot of conversation happening around the NFL on Twitter outside of the people who already follow our account.

We think that with a programme like this, both in us putting more content through this platform, but also some of the things that Twitter is going to do to put their thumb on the scale and really extend the reach out from that 5-6m people and make sure that many more people on the Twitter platform are seeing it, we are going to reach more of our addicts. But we also hope to see more of the casual fans who might not know there is a game on Thursday night – now they see some highlights and they tune in.

Internationally, because of the time zones and the geography, sometimes it’s hard to replicate that really strong communal aspect. One of the things about a social

“On a primary level it’s other Steelers fans talking about the game. On a secondary level, if I see people tweeting

about a game, maybe I want to now watch the game”

*During the 2013 Super Bowl final there was a power outage for 34 minutes. Biscuit manufacturer Oreo tweeted during the black-out: “Power out? No Problem. You can still dunk in the dark.” It was retweeted 10,000 times within an hour. The tweet won multiple advertising awards and was considered more effective than Oreo’s television advertising during the game.



promotion of, and tune-in, to all our games.But during the game window because of that real-

time aspect, we wanted to test a little bit what the best experience is. We will do that around our games first to make sure we are smart and know the best execution.

And as we get smarter and know exactly how to maximise that, then we will look to roll that out down the road. We wanted an evolution in our approach, not just to completely flip everything upside down from day one.

When we did renewals with our networks we got two sets of rights:

•The right to do our NFL redZone channel, that we now distribute alongside NFL Network here domestically and internationally

•In-progress highlights for all our games for our digital assets such as NFL.com or NFL Mobile.

As we have done that we have seen incremental consumption around both of those assets and both of those sets of rights.

But we have also seen an overall growth in our TV ratings. When we take these decisions we try to weigh all sides of the scale to make sure we are not increasing consumption here but cannibalising it on the other side.

We ask: how do we lift everything? So what we have done in the last three to four years, in addition to all the information Twitter has been able to share, gave us a lot of confidence. As we have added our content in more places, it has been additive to our entire business.

That’s our mindset in how we attack everything. We want to be sure we are not just creating new consumption that shifts people, but we want to create more overall consumption.

How long are the in-match highlights clips and what kind of ads will you do around that footage?One of the reasons why we wanted to do a shorter deal was to assess what is the right form of content and the right form of advertising to go around it.

The ads are going to be short in format, about six to

a tweet gets posted, it can get pushed down pretty far in your Twitter stream.

If it’s a game and bunch of people are commenting, they can keep the tweet with the embedded highlights at the top of people’s feeds. So maybe they don’t come in for 20 minutes but when they come in they can still see that content. That’s one of the levers they can pull.

real-time is great. But for high traffic moments when there is a lot of conversation it can be tough to catch all of the activity.

This is a great way to make sure that people don’t miss some of these rich highlights or updates or other things you want to push out through the platform. We thought that was a great area where Twitter was bringing value to the partnership.

Why do you only have in-game content from the Thursday night NFL Network matches? Did the NFL broadcast partners prevent you from doing this around the games they carry?The anticipation that the world was already moving towards an expectation of on-demand content was something that we had already started to see when we did our TV extensions [in 2009 and 2011].

An important part of those deals was making sure we kept the rights to do things like this for all our games. Looking to next year, it is something that we could do with whoever we choose to partner with going forward.

One of the things we wanted to do was make sure we are being smart. Make sure we understand all the impacts of putting more of our content out over these platforms.

We believe it will be incremental to [TV] viewing of games and you have seen the networks enter into similar partnerships because they believe the same thing. But we wanted to make sure that we weren’t jumping in at the deep end.

We were going to take a deliberate approach. What that means is that we have a very comprehensive programming strategy with Twitter. We are going to be out there seven days a week with content and we will do things which drive

“We try to weigh all sides of the scale to make sure we are not increasing consumption here

but cannibalising it on the other side”



that we are building value. We are trying to understand how different distribution models fit together.

We have to give our partners the content to enable them to build their businesses. But we also have to understand how new platforms are emerging and how content can be delivered over those platforms.

you look at some of the things we have done domestically, like adding online streaming rights for our [TV] partners. But on mobile, that is outside [the main TV deal] and we think that is an incremental value. We built that. It’s a different product to someone wanting to watch on a TV screen.

We make sure we have the right conversations and work with our partners through that. Then we try to build value for our overall consumption across all platforms.

But if you look at some of our other products like our NFL Sunday Ticket product, where you can access all out of market games, that product is a “TV everywhere” product, with the rights to television, plus mobile, plus internet.

For that premium product, we recognised that if someone is paying $200 to $300 there is an expectation that they will need the overall platform. It’s about figuring out the right approach for each set of rights.

eight seconds in length. The content will be short. An average play is anywhere between five and 10 seconds.

The highlights of the play with maybe another angle or two, you’re talking about clips around 30 seconds long. It will probably be shorter than in-game highlights that you get in other places.

More and more of our fans want to watch video content on their phones and their mobile devices. In this environment we will keep it to shorter form. People who want four or five minutes of highlights can get longer-form content on NFL.com or NFL Mobile.

The Twitter and Verizon deals show the NFL is prepared to do platform-specific deals. You do not do all-rights, platform-neutral deals with your broadcast partners as many other rights-holders now do. Why are you taking a different road?I am not sure that there is such a distinct contrast. We recognise that there is a broader expectation at consumer level, and you have to get your content in more and more places.

As we look to distribute our sets of rights, we are cognisant of that, but what we also want to do is make sure

“We have to give our partners the content to build their businesses. But we also have to

understand new platforms and how content can be delivered over those platforms”



•Facebook

•Twitter

•Vine

•Snapchat.

•Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest are used for distributing NBA images.

The NBA sees its website and other official sites as the destinations for NBA fans who want the most complete picture. Each provides video highlights for all games and events, as well as news, blogs, statistics and scores. The nba.com website might carry 50 clips per day, ranging in duration from 10 seconds to five minutes.

The NBA League Pass offers live games for hardcore fans for a subscription fee and also shows in-game highlights and archive footage. NBA GameTime offers video and editorial content produced for a specific country, targeting the local fanbase in a particular market.

The youTube channel reaches a wider audience of avid, casual and connected fans. The content focuses on best plays, such as the Daily Top 10, and outstanding performances. A typical subject for such content would be LeBron James’ 61-point haul for Miami Heat against the Charlotte Bobcats last season.

Facebook is largely a platform for off-the-court, behind-the-scenes content, as well as images and graphics.

Twitter is the platform for live events and breaking news, including score updates and in-game highlights under the league’s #nbarapidreplay initiative.

Vine is used exclusively during live events and shows videos of players pre- and post-game.

Snapchat appeals to a younger demographic, and the league uses it to show live events from beginning to end via photos and videos.

Tumblr is used to showcase more artistic photos, while Pinterest is more female-oriented, with a focus on apparel

Original TV Sports Markets story published May 2014

The exploitation of short-form content across multiple platforms has become a central part of North American basketball league the NBA’s global media rights strategy over the last three years.

Short-form content is extremely important in Europe, for example, due to the time difference. As Matt Brabants, the league’s SVP, global media distribution and business operations, told TV Sports Markets: “Not all our fans will stay up to 2.30am or 3am. Short-form content is increasingly the way we can get our message to our fans.”

All NBA games are now produced, televised and edited for digital use, specifically with mobile consumption in mind.

The league uses the following platforms and products to provide short-form video:

•nba.com and other official websites

•the NBA League Pass, the league’s out-of-market sports package

•NBA GameTime, the official mobile app

•the NBA youTube channel

4.1 The NBA’s short-form content strategy

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and fashion.The NBA is the most successful US sports league in social

media reach. Its youTube channel has 5.6m subscribers, its Facebook presence has 23.1m likes and its Twitter feed has 10.2m followers.

The league also uses short-form content in sponsorship deals. For example, when fast food chain Taco Bell renewed as an NBA sponsor for the 2013-14 season, the two launched a digital/social media project called Buzzer Beaters that showed highlights of last-second, game-winning shots. The clips were shown on a Taco Bell-branded section on nba.com.



More often than not though we like to do multi-year deals to build a partnership. We have some partners who have been with us for decades, and we are more amenable to doing longer-term deals with them.

For example, we have CCTV in China, we are going into a 28th season with them. We started our partnership back in the 1980s delivering games literally on tape with a delay of several days. That has evolved to live satellite transmission. We have also been in business with Sky Italia in Italy for many years, and Prisa in Spain.

There is so much evolving at the moment with linear television and the digital space expanding in different directions. There are many different things we have to take into account. We might do a short-term deal with a new entrant, we may want to consolidate in a certain market, or there may be an emerging technological company we can do a deal with.

How important is it to the NBA to make its content more localised?EM: Our digital strategy is based on localisation, via the nba.com website. We licence partners in EMEA the right to exploit the nba.com destination. It’s an easy way for us to monetise very efficiently as it means you can fully rely on a local partner which knows the market. It means we can reach out to our fans and establish our brand. We now have 17 mini, local destination sites.

MB: In places where we think it makes sense we are partnering locally. There are 17 localised nba.com websites, where we partner with a strong digital company who create it with local-language material. It supports all the

Original interview published May 2014

The NBA doesn’t have a set sales cycle when selling its international media rights. Why not?Elsa Memmi: It gives us an extraordinary amount of freedom. We are able to have full control and flexibility in the sale of all our media assets. Approaching every single country market by market has its advantages. We like the flexibility of not having sales cycles. We don’t organise tenders. It means we can agree a TV deal for two years or for four years depending on the offer.

We assess the total media landscape: television, digital, who our existing partners are, the local economy, even merchandising. We simply choose the best partner who will grow the value of our brand and reach.

It’s very important to be able to listen to the needs and requirements of our partners. Their needs cannot depend on cycles that we impose. If a company, for example, wants to launch an OTT [over-the-top, i.e. internet-based] channel in the next year and they believe the NBA will be a driver for them, they can approach us about a deal. We jump on opportunities to develop the league.

We don’t have a standard approach to our sales. We take it case by case and deal by deal.

Matt Brabants: We don’t have a standard approach to our sales. We take it case by case and deal by deal. It really depends on our strategy in a particular market or region, the strategy of a partner or potential partner, and the landscape of the media market. Sometimes we agree short-term deals in an instance where we are trying to find the right partner.

4.2 NBA on its media rights sales strategy Interview with Matt Brabants, SVP, global media distribution and business operations, and Elsa Memmi, VP, global media distribution EMEA



marketing, and the best way to do that is often to go on a pay-TV platform.

Free-to-air has changed its meaning. you don’t have to pay for your content. That’s what we are doing with digital. We have the nba.com website we have a dedicated youTube channel, we use social media like Facebook and Instagram – that’s also free-to-air. The meaning shouldn’t only cover a terrestrial channel.

MB: Again, it is territory by territory. We are aware of the fact we want to continue to develop the sport and build the fan base.

In a place where we have the ability to make our games available to a wider audience, we do that. We also try to marry free-to-air and pay. In Germany, a very popular market for the NBA especially with the likes of Dirk Nowitzki, one of the biggest stars of the NBA, we have weekly coverage on Sport1 and we also complement that with a weekly game on nba.com. This is streamed live each week for free for fans that may not have access to the NBA through Sport1’s pay-TV channel.

It’s not just through TV. We use the medium which will get to a broader audience and increasingly that is digital. In countries like Brazil, India and China, we try to make our games available to a wider audience.

What is the NBA’s strategy with regard to its short-form content, and why?EM: We have had steady double digit growth over the last one or two years from a TV standpoint, both from TV and digital deals. TV is very much a big part of what we do and is our main source of revenue. Digital is growing though. The monetisation of digital rights was the question raised by the organisation around seven years ago. I think some sports properties are struggling because they asked the question at a much later stage.

Over the last three years we have had a more focused, more specific plan on our short-form content delivery. Our single objective is to reach out to our fans, wherever they are. The launch of our dedicated youTube channel has helped this – we have had more than 2bn views and

things we are doing with our TV partners and means we have a direct reach to our fans, both online and via mobile. It’s very difficult to create a premium editorial experience when based in the US for a country such as Spain or China for example.

Our strategy has been to partner in each market with the strongest digital portals possible to serve as the publisher of our local site. We get the benefit of economy of scale and they host the site. We also benefit from the audience that was already going to that company’s website. It is a key pillar in our strategy to localise and provide the best possible editorial experience for fans.

How do you balance exposure and revenue for your coverage on free-to-air and pay-television?EM: It’s always a difficult question, it is always a challenge to figure out which way is best. Exposure is absolutely crucial – it’s the way for us to be able to have a presence. To be able to have coverage in every household in a country would be spectacular.

However, there are a lot of other competing rights for free-to-air broadcasters. A lot of other sports are shown on free-to-air, and usually the two strongest sports we are up against are football and rugby or football and cricket. We need to make sure we get the right positioning and

“It’s very difficult to create a premium editorial experience when based in the US for a country such

as Spain or China. Our strategy has been to partner in each market with the strongest digital portals”

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fans internationally are using mobile, so it is now a key facet of our distribution.

How important is the NBA’s League Pass in making content available to a wider audience?EM: The League Pass, which is available in every single country outside the US, is our direct-to-consumer approach. The League Pass is a platform where a consumer on the internet, using an xbox for example, can watch every live NBA game. We have 30 teams playing 82 games over the whole season. On any single night we have up to 14 games being played. The League Pass is the only thing which can enable a fan to access all this live content as well as highlights and interviews.

From an international standpoint, Europe is the biggest driver of the league outside the US. Three of the top five countries using the league pass are in Europe, and Germany is top.

NBA TV is completely different. It was developed as a product to help grow our TV business. It is a 24/7 channel which we licence and distribute to channels in Europe. Prisa in Spain, for example, carry the channel.

we have close to 6m subscribers. It’s a very important component of our digital growth.

We shot a three-minute video in March, asking all the players of Chelsea Football Club to take part in a six-court challenge. It got around 300,000 views on youTube and it was shared widely on social media. We need that exposure, but to get it we need to be extremely relevant. We need to be different and we need to be localised. We have local-language Facebook accounts, we have an Instagram account, and this means we can differentiate content.

MB: Short-form content is important for a couple of reasons. We acknowledge that in some markets, in particular in Europe, we have time zone challenges. Not all our fans will stay up to 2.30am or 3am. Short-form content is increasingly the way we can get our message out to our fans. It gives fans a better feel for the players, especially in places where live games don’t go out at the best times.

Short-form content is a very strong form for digital. We are taking a mobile-first approach to our content as our digital business is moving increasingly to mobile. We have a keen eye on mobile distribution. More than 60 per cent of visits to the nba.com website come from mobile. A lot of

“Short-form content is increasingly the way we get our message out to our fans. It gives fans a better

feel for the players, especially in places where live games don’t go out at the best times”



president of media strategy, told TV Sports Markets: “The more information fans provide the more personalisation we can offer. That will drive deeper engagement with our fans and advertising partners.”

One of the advantages of short-form content is that it can be syndicated across multiple platforms without undermining the value of main live broadcast deals or taking eyeballs away from the league’s own digital operations. Unlike many other sports leagues, the NFL does not, however, have its own channel on youTube.

“youTube is an incredible consumption platform but we’re not convinced as yet that it is an effective distribution platform for our content,” Schroeder said. “I’m sure in the long run we’ll find a way to get some business done together though.”

Two minutes120 Sports is an online streaming platform set up by Time, publisher of the sports magazine Sports Illustrated. Time’s main partners in the venture include: MLBAM (MLB Advanced Media), the media arm of the MLB, which built the app and website; digital sports media company Silver Chalice; and Campus Insiders, a US college sports producer and distributor that is a joint venture between Silver Chalice and the IMG College agency, part of IMG.

120 Sports carries short clips from the NHL, NBA, MLB, motor racing’s Nascar, and college sport from Campus Insiders.

Programming will be in specially-produced two-minute segments. As well as match clips, it will include news, match updates and player interviews.

Bob Bowman, president and chief executive of MLB Advanced Media, the MLB’s digital media subsidiary, said earlier this year that the content would be produced and

Original TV Sports Markets article published June 2014

Two services launched this summer showed the increasing strategic and commercial importance of short-form content to the big US sports leagues and underlined the degree to which US sport is leading the way in exploiting digital media.

In August 2014, American football’s NFL launched NFL Now, a personalised on-demand digital content service. In June 2014, 120 Sports, an online channel based around two-minute – 120-second – clips was launched, backed by a group of rights-holders including ice hockey’s NHL, baseball’s MLB and basketball’s NBA. It is thought the NFL was also approached to be involved in 120 Sports but declined to focus on its own offerings.

Instant gratificationWith NFL Now, fans provide the NFL with information about their favourite teams, players and other interests, and receive a video feed tailored to those preferences. The content includes brief highlights, archive footage and behind-the-scenes content.

The app is initially being offered free on an advertising-funded basis across Windows, iOS, Android and xbox One. The NFL already has agreements in place with some of its existing commercial partners to acquire the inventory. These include its mobile partner Verizon, plus Microsoft, yahoo and Gillette.

Although the advertising income from such a service is small compared to what the major television networks can earn around NFL live content, the relative value of the airtime is high because of its highly targeted nature.

As such, the venture has commercial as well as promotional value. Hans Schroeder, the league’s senior vice

5. NFL goes it alone as leagues push out short-form content



year. MLBAM revenue is estimated to be between $650m and $700m per year. This comprises online ticket sales ($150m), shop sales via MLB Shop ($100m), advertising and sponsorship ($150m) and content subscriptions ($250m). Each of these areas, except MLB Shop, have experienced annual growth of 20-25 per cent in recent years.

Major US sports leagues on social mediaFacebook likes

League Number

MLB 5.6m

NBA 25.4m

NFL 11m

NHL 3.4m

Twitter followersLeague Number

MLB 3.75m

NBA 11m

NFL 7.1m

NHL 2.6m

YouTube channel subscribersLeague Number

MLB 318,000

NBA 5.7m

NFL No channel

NHL 483,000

Source: SportBusiness Group Figures from 19 August 2014

National Hockey LeagueThe NHL’s website, NHL.com, carries free video clips as a way of engaging with fans. Clips vary in length from one to five minutes and are preceded by pre-roll advertising. Content includes highlights of top fixtures that are posted within a few hours of being played.

The NHL’s official youTube channel has 483,000 subscribers. It posts highlights from games at around the

presented “in a way that no-one has done before.”The service will initially be free and ad-funded, with Time

handling the ad sales. It will be available on all major mobile and tablet platforms as well as having a dedicated website, 120Sports.com. A premium version of the service is planned for 2015.

Major League BaseballMLB manages its digital rights through MLBAM. MLB.com carries dozens of video clips of between one and three minutes under headings such as FastCast, C More, Cut4 and Daily recaps.

MLB gets clips uploaded as fast as possible, sometimes while games are still in play. The primary purpose is engagement, with MLB hoping to move fans in the direction of premium-priced media products. Every clip is also preceded by a pre-roll ad, usually baseball themed.

The MLB revamped its youTube channel in 2013 to include: live game streams to some matches (only available outside major media-rights markets); match highlights clips uploaded two days after being broadcast; and thousands of archive clips. The rationale was partly promotional and partly to generate advertising revenue on a revenue share basis. The channel has over 315,000 subscribers.

MLB signed up to Twitter’s Amplify programme in May 2013. The league also creates original content for its ‘Fan Cave’ – a production studio where video features based around top players are shot.

MLB’s premium online product MLB.TV is based around live ‘out-of-market’ games, and costs between $40 and $120 per year depending on the level of subscription.

MLB has a separate premium mobile product, MLB At Bat, which can be acquired as a standalone package for $9.99 for the 2014 season, or $2.99 per month. It includes live radio broadcasts of games, a live Game of the Day, in-game highlights and live Look-Ins (brief streams of in-progress games). There are also post-match highlights and a video library archive searchable by player, team or keyword.

MLB doesn’t give a detailed breakdown of its subscriber base but analysts say it sells 2m-3m paid-for products each



subscribers get similar content to other network subscribers but, in addition, are able to watch live games broadcast by media group NBCUniversal. This deal was set up in a partnership between NHL, NBC Sports and Verizon.

There is also NHL Vault, a subscription service offering post-game replays and access to archive games dating back to the 1960s. NHL Vault is part of the GameCenter Live subscription, and can also be bought separately for $4.95 per month.

The NHL’s fanbase and revenues are split much more evenly between the US and Canada than the other major US leagues. In the US, the NHL has a 10-year media rights deal, from 2011-12 to 2020-21, worth $2bn with NBCU. In Canada, it recently signed a 12-year deal, from 2014-15 to 2026-27, worth $4.8bn with rogers Communications.

This means the digital strategy needs to straddle two territories. Of all the visitors to the NHL.com website, 26.6 per cent are based in Canada.

same time as NHL.com. It also has a section called youTube Exclusives where it shows extra highlights and exclusive behind-the-scenes videos.

On Facebook, the number of NHL fans has risen from around 1m to 3.4m since 2010. There are also six individual teams that have more than 1m Facebook fans. The NHL’s Facebook page hosts video from recent fixtures.

GameCenter Live is the NHL’s premium subscription service offering live out-of-market games, on-demand replays and in-game highlights. It is available across multiple devices, both domestically and internationally, for around $100-$150 per season.

Before 2012, the NHL dealt exclusively with Verizon as its mobile partner. Now, fans can access GameCenter via mobile regardless of their network provider, but there continues to be a special relationship between the NHL and Verizon.

Under a three-year deal signed in 2012, Verizon



lastminute.com and the Financial Times newspaper website.Targeting websites had previously proved difficult for UK

sports rights-holders. Many pirate websites were registered in countries where there was no effective policing of them. Even where the league was successful in shutting down a website, it would often reappear days later under a new domain name. One industry insider said it was “like playing a game of whack-a-mole.”

At the end of 2012, following a successful test case brought that year against prominent Swedish file-sharing website PirateBay, Section 97A began to be used by music and film companies to close down or limit access to file-sharing sites offering illegal content. The Premier League’s case was the first time the legislation was used by a sports body.

“It follows the strategy increasingly adopted in challenging piracy of not bothering about attacking the sources,” said competition lawyer John Enser, of law firm Olswang, “which are often offshore and too hard to get to, but attacking the ability for a ‘casual’ pirate to access that material.”

The league’s case was supported in the High Court by England’s Football Association, the English Football League, the Scottish Premier League, Uefa, the PGA European Tour, the Professional Darts Corporation, World Snooker and England’s rugby Football Union.

Copyright definitionOne interesting aspect of the ruling is the scope of copyright protection it gives the league. This follows a small change the league made in the way it sends its live match signal.

Until the end of the 2011-12 season, the feed of all 380 league matches per season was transmitted live around

Original TV Sports Markets article published July 2013

The English Premier League in July 2013 successfully stopped a popular pirate website illegally live streaming its matches in the UK by making internet service providers (ISPs), instead of the websites, the target of legal action.

The league used Section 97A of the UK’s Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/97A, which allows injunctions against “service providers… where that service provider has actual knowledge of another person using their service to infringe copyright”.

The Premier League’s injunction forced the UK’s six main ISPs – BSkyB, BT, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk Telecom, Telefònica UK and Virgin Media – to block their customers’ access to the site.

The website in question was Firstrow Sports, which had become hugely popular on the back of the Premier League streams. It was the 239th most popular website in the UK in April 2013, ahead of major brands such as travel website

6. Premier League targets ISPs to block pirated live streams in UK

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http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/97A

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The court questioned, however, whether there could be any copyright in the live broadcast of the match itself. It said that a claim to copyright might be limited only to the “creative works” of the league, which clearly covered content such as the league theme tune, logos and action replays.

In the Firstrow case, the league claimed copyright in: the films comprising the recorded world feed; the films comprising the action replays in any live feed; the artistic works comprising the logos of the Premier League and league sponsor Barclays which are shown in the recorded world feed; and the artistic works comprising two sets of on-screen graphics which are shown in the recorded world feed.

The judge, Justice Arnold, said he was satisfied by the evidence filed by the league that “copyright subsists in these works” and that the league owns those copyrights.

the world to Premier League rights-holders by the league’s production partner IMG Media.

In 2012-13, IMG began transmitting the feed with a delay of a few seconds. This means it sends out a recording, which technically counts as a “film”, which is a category of intellectual property protected by UK copyright law.

The league made the change due to doubts raised about the extent of its copyright during its failed European Court of Justice case against UK publican Karen Murphy in October 2011.

The league had challenged Murphy over her use of a Greek satellite feed to show Premier League matches in her Portsmouth pub. The court ruled that accessing satellite services from other EU member states was not illegal but said that such broadcasts might infringe copyright (TV Sports Markets 15:18).



As Jörg Daubitzer, managing director of DFL Sports Enterprises, the commercial arm of the German Bundesliga, put it, “I don’t consider smart TV a game-changer, but it is an opportunity to widen the offerings to the fan.”

He said development was happening slowly because: it takes time to change consumer behaviour; suitable offerings have yet to be developed; and the infrastructure required to run high-quality broadband services was not universally available. “To make progress in these three areas takes time,” he said.

Few appsConnected sets accounted for 39 per cent of global TV set sales in 2013, according to research firm Futuresource, which estimates that the share will rise to 87 per cent by 2018. Over half of owners of smart TV sets in the US and Western Europe use them to access the internet.

Some industry experts say one of the main reasons for the relatively slow growth of sport-specific applications for

Original TV Sports Markets article published May 2014

Data from Know the Fan – The Global Sports Media Consumption Report 2014 suggests sports and media companies are missing an opportunity to engage fans and drive revenues using internet-connected TV sets.

According to the report, sports fans using internet-connected sets believe they have more control over the sport they watch, that a greater range of sport is available to them, and that the sports content available is more personalised to their tastes.

Despite the benefits, the number of people accessing sport in this way is still low given current penetration levels of the TV sets.

A platform enabling big-screen HD coverage to be complemented by on-screen information – offering both a high-quality ‘lean-back’ experience and content for the data-hungry fan – ought to be a game-changer. So far at least, it has not been.

7. Sport ‘slow to exploit smart TV’

Source: Know the Fan 2014

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Sport on connected TVs: low take-upThe % of sports fans consuming sport via an internet-connected TV, set-top box or gaming console

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you a proper explanation as to why it is there.”He said the anomaly would probably be resolved in

the next rounds of rights agreements. “The development of technology is quicker than the development of rights agreements. Connected TV is one of the things that has got caught up in that.”

Manufacturers waitingBilly Wright, director of European strategy, planning and business operations at Samsung, a leading smart TV producer, says the time spent by viewers on smart TV services like BBC iPlayer, Netflix, and Skype has “exploded,” and is evidence of already high levels of consumer engagement.

There are several reasons why sport is still not maximising the possibilities offered by the platform, he said.

“A lot depends on whether appropriate digital rights are available, or whether they have been locked away by existing deals,” he said. “Where they have been locked away, which is generally the case, is the licensee in a position either technically or commercially to exploit their rights and the underlying content through the smart TV platform?”

smart TV is that rights-holders have not yet adapted their licensing strategies to take into account the opportunities offered by the medium.

In part, this is due to the technology being young and rights often being tied into long cycles which are not responsive enough to technological change. In some cases it is also due to confusion about exactly what kind of rights are at stake: internet or TV?

rupert Murdoch’s News Corp last year rolled out its BallBall service, a free app and website available in local languages in Japan, Indonesia and Vietnam (TV Sports Markets 17:15). The service combines short video clips of top football with editorial content from News-owned newspaper titles, such as The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times.

Fans can access the content on smartphones, tablets and computers, but not on connected TVs, something which News Corp’s global head of rights, Simon Greenberg, puts down to it being such a new medium.

“At the moment, a service like BallBall, which is on devices enabled by the internet, isn’t allowed on a connected TV. That anomaly is in all the rights agreements. It sticks out like a sore thumb and nobody can really give


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Sport on connected TVs: more personalisedThe % of internet-connected TV or set-top box users who believe that the sport available via these devices is more personalised to their tastes

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around sports events is driven by the desire for a greater level of statistical analysis than that provided by the main broadcast feed.

Connected TV allows fans to see live coverage and data together on a single screen, a development that Samsung, among others, views as an opportunity.

Samsung this year launched Kick, an app which overlays rich data and analytics on live sports broadcasts on connected TVs. The service covers top European and international football.

The app has been developed together with digital media company Perform. Statistics are provided in real time by the Perform group’s data services Opta and runningBall, with editorial content from the Perform-owned Goal.com football website.

“We attach real importance to data, analytics and insights to enrich the experience, from pre-match predictions to live insights to post-match analysis,” Wright said. The service taps into what he sees as a clear emerging trend: multi-screen viewing and interaction – watching the live match on the big screen while drilling into analytics or exchanging views with fellow fans over social networks on a tablet or mobile screen.

Wright said it was difficult for non-broadcast companies to break into the market for building services around sport on smart TVs. “The key question is whether there are rights available, and, if so, whether you can afford them. As of today, the answer to both questions will more often than not be no.”

Wright questioned whether traditional broadcasters who have acquired sports rights were exploiting them in a way that gets the best out of smart TVs.

“If you are an incumbent broadcaster, are you thinking through the best way to use the rights you have in that context, to use smart TV as a complement to the live linear broadcast?

“It’s fair to say that a lot of the incumbents have not particularly embraced smart TV yet. Part of that is just about mind-set and where they have come from. Part of it is around protecting existing revenue models,” he said.

Data hungryUS sports fans have always had a big appetite for statistics and data around live events. This demand is now increasingly evident among audiences in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world. A lot of second-screen activity


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Sport on connected TVs: greater range of content The % of internet-connected TV or set top box users who believe that there is a wider range of sport available to watch via these platforms when compared to their other service providers.

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everyone who has expressed a like on Facebook for Cristiano ronaldo in Indonesia. “It might cost you quite a lot of money, because there are a lot of them. But in terms of growing your audience and getting them to stick with you in future, it is a very good and targeted marketing tool. It is far more effective than traditional advertising,” he said.

Wright concurs, but adds a note of caution. “Social media is far more targeted but the audience is also far more critical of overt commercialisation, relative to traditional ad-supported media channels. Brands need to approach this space carefully if they are not to alienate fans.”

Generational issueHarnessing social media in the right way presents a certain challenge for businesses. Social media is largely a passion of the young. And most of the companies in sports media are run by executives aged 40 or over. “There is a generational issue around social media,” Greenberg admits.

“One of the things which we found is that you have to recruit people that understand it. That means recruiting much younger people and giving them management roles in your organisation that maybe in years gone by you wouldn’t have considered.”

Social still soaringAnother area of rapid growth has been in the consumption of sports content via social media platforms. In Know the Fan 2014, the consumption of sport via social networking platforms increased in all markets previously surveyed except Turkey, where it decreased slightly.

The number of hours spent accessing sport on social networking sites has reached remarkable levels when compared with the time spent watching sport on TV, considering that the comparison is between a way of consuming sport which is 70 years old and one which did not exist until a few years ago.

In seven of the 16 markets surveyed, fans are spending at least two hours per week consuming sport this way. These include India (2.6 hours), Brazil (2.5), Turkey (2.3), the UAE (2.2), Italy and China (2.1), and Spain (2.0).

rights-holders and media companies are increasingly looking at ways to work social media into the commercial offering. As News Corp’s Greenberg said, the advantages of doing so are great because of “the connectivity you get with the user, the speed you can get to the user, and the way you can target the football fan.”

A marketing campaign could target, for example,

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