A panel of sports streaming experts discussed how to make more money from their platforms at this week’s virtual event from FierceVideo: the StreamTV Sports Summit.
One obvious new way that sports streamers hope to rake in new revenue is via sports betting.
Marc Kohn is chief marketing officer at Overtime, a company that offers sports content on its own platform as well as across social media channels. Kohn said a lot of leagues are hoping sports betting bails them out of their live viewing problems. “They’re really hoping that live sports betting is the thing that’s going to answer their live rights issues,” said Kohn.
Kirby Grines, founder of the advisory company 43Twenty, moderated the panel. He joked, “I just realized that ‘betting’ sounds a lot less harsh than ‘gambling.’”
Jason Weber, Roku's partner growth manager, agreed that online betting (or gambling) has huge monetary potential. He also sees it as part of a bigger phenomenon in which viewers want to be more personally engaged with their sports content, particularly through social media.
“Leagues who lean into social platforms are the ones who are winning,” said Weber. “If you think of sports highlights on social platforms as a threat to your business you’re going to miss the boat. You can’t necessarily attribute viewership to social platforms, but … it’s a great way to grow the brand.”
Micro-viewing
Kim Hurwitz, chief marketing officer with Fite TV, touched on a second way that sports streamers could garner more revenues: through micro-viewing.
She said, “We’re starting to get approached by companies that specialize in re-selling parts of major events. I think they’re talking to a lot of other big sports leagues out there too. There’s more than one of these companies. And basically it’s kind of like micro pay-per-view. I think there’s a lot of younger demos that just want the highlights. Or maybe they just want to follow particular sports guys or girls.”
She said she doesn’t see it as inconceivable that at some point Fite TV might offer “just the knock-outs” if people wanted to only buy those.
New partnerships
Finally, a third way that sports streamers could make more money is from new partnerships and revenue-sharing arrangements.
The panelists noted that the subscription streaming service WWE Network recently struck a deal to be exclusively available through NBCUniversal’s Peacock in the U.S. WWE Network’s content is now available to Peacock Premium subscribers. All live pay-per-view events including WrestleMania and SummerSlam will also be available on Peacock.
RELATED: WWE Network streaming service moving to Peacock in the U.S.
Rokus' Weber said, “From a WWE perspective I think they realized that growing, operating and scaling a direct to consumer service is costly. Partnering with Peacock certainly is a nice benefit there.” He also said that from Peacock’s perspective, it just picked up WWE’s 1.5 million subscribers. And those new subs may not have otherwise been interested in Peacock. “It brings in net new audiences and allows for better retention over time,” said Weber.
Hurwitz said she thinks others will follow in WWE’s footsteps. “There are some networks like Netflix that don’t have advertising, but I can certainly see them licensing some of their content to other outlets. Why wouldn’t sports do that?” She said the WWE has “started so many trends,” and “they must have had a very good financial reason for doing that Peacock deal.”
But Overtime’s Kohn said, while he thinks it’s a great deal “from a Peacock perspective,” he’s “not a believer” in the business model. “I think you will see many more of these transactions fail than succeed going forward,” said Kohn.
Tom St. John, head of partnerships at the advertising tech company Beachfront, countered: “I think it’s natural you’ll see more leagues align themselves with bigger streaming platforms when you consider the kind of pocket-book space that people are going to have to dedicate to subscription services. Realistically, how many of them are they going to have all at once? So alignment under a handful of bigger ones does, to some degree, make sense.”