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March 22, 2023

Reminder: 

Andy Marston has taken the reigns to JohnWallStreet on Wednesday mornings. You can find his

Sports Pundit newsletter below.

I will continue writing for Monday, Tuesday and Thursday mornings. 

We are getting close to announcing a Friday columnist. His first column under the JWS banner could run as soon as March 31. 

Broadcast Exclusivity has Become a "Slightly Archaic" Concept

Earlier this month, despite securing its first U.S. linear TV deal, LIV Golf was derided for an apparent lack of interest among fans during its season opener at Mayakoba. 

The accusation was leveled again over this past weekend as the series held its second event on the expanded 2023 calendar.

Per Nielsen, the series opener averaged just 286,000 viewers Saturday and 291,000 viewers on Sunday. While information is currently limited, early indications are the figures from this past weekend in Tucson, Arizona (JWS' college home) are even lower.

LIV has countered the notion that its product underperformed during its TV debut. Pointing to data from audience measurement provider iSpot, it claims the coverage generated a total audience of 3.2 million viewers on linear television across CW affiliates and Nexstar stations. A strong effort, particularly on a channel that hasn’t typically broadcast live sport. 

Outside the US, viewing figures are harder to source. The tour struggled to find international broadcast partners and has since launched its own over-the-top (OTT) platform, LIV Golf+.

Whilst LIV has backed its partnership with CW and will hope to secure deals with international broadcasters sooner rather than later, Murray Barnett (founder, 26West Sport) suggests the upstart golf tour should also be considering more targeted ways to reach a differentiated audience.

“Fragmentation means the right strategy for a number of different rightsholders going forward is to be visible in a number of different broadcast environments," Barnett said. "The difficulty will be explaining to the various broadcast partners, whether they are YouTube or traditional TV channels, that they're not cannibalizing each other and that they're actually going after different audiences.”

Murray went on to speak anecdotally. 

“My son is fifteen. He's never going to sit down and watch live sport on a TV channel because he doesn't watch anything on a TV channel anymore. However, if it was streamed on YouTube, with the right kind of personality, he may be interested to do that.”

This is a model that we have seen exercised cleverly elsewhere in sport. 

Ahead of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, FIFA reached a deal to partner with

Casimiro

. The deal allowed the Brazilian gaming streamer to show one match/day live to his followers (see: 3.4 million on Twitch, 5 million on YouTube). 

According to Streams Charts, his broadcast of Brazil’s loss to Croatia was the most-watched YouTube live stream in 2022, it peaked with an audience of over six million people. 

“By engaging with influencers and creators, our content offering alongside the streams has broken new barriers for FIFA," Jean-Christophe Petit (director of media partnerships, FIFA) said. "Now that we have seen how well this new playbook can work, we’re excited to see what is possible as we move forward.”

More recently, a similar model was implemented by

RMC Sport

, a French broadcaster with domestic rights to the UEFA Europa League. RMC shared its rights to the first leg of the FC Barcelona vs. Manchester United clash with popular Twitch streamer Domingo (1.6 million followers), who carried the match for free on his channel. The stream drew an average concurrent audience of 162,000, with a peak of over 200,000 viewers; a noteworthy total considering the linear French broadcast average only averaged 390,000 fans.

“The current concept of broadcast exclusivity has become a slightly archaic concept because different audiences are consuming sports on different platforms,” Barnett said. 

He argues that in reality, “There's little cannibalization because it's actually just going to where the different audiences are, which are much more fractured than they were ten or twenty years ago.”

There is some precedent for domestic rights owners leveraging multiple platforms and presentations to cast a wider net (see: the NFL's Manningcast or NHL's Big City Greens broadcast).

“The idea of having multiple feeds, or multiple different ways in which you can view a match is ultimately the way to go if you're trying to appeal to the widest possible audience, because increasingly, the level of customization that people are looking for in the way that they view content is growing,” Barnett said. 

This is where the difficulty –and opportunity– lies for LIV Golf as it works alongside a broadcast channel where golf fans wouldn’t usually find themselves. 

“This is all about needing to fish where the fish are and knowing that different fish take different bait,” Barnett said.

Content partnerships with the golfers already on LIV's highly impressive roster, as well as with popular creators across the golf landscape (think: Good Good Golf, Paige Spirinac, Rick Shields), could provide interesting adjacencies to linear television and help the upstart tour reach new audiences on alternative platforms.

There are also services like ReCast, that encourage people with a following to re-share content (and gives them a cut of the revenue). By providing a different context, rightsholders like LIV could reach new audiences.

Building an independent media brand is a heavy lift. We use this space to shine a spotlight on some of our favorite sports, media and finance content creators. We hope you will check them out. 

The Albachiara Chronicle by Roger Mitchell

Roger Mitchell and his podcast AYNE look at the uncertain waters of sport and finance, to try and better understand the risks facing the business of sport. Recent Story: Sport should ask Archimedes about Leverage!

Excerpt: The story of finance in the last 50 years is the story of leverage.Make absolutely no mistake about that. Leverage is a fancy term for the use of debt. The lever is debt. Its power is overwhelming and, in many ways, is the big secret in the world of finance.Say I can buy any sports asset at a cost of 100 and, then, sell it in 2 years at 200, I have doubled my money, a 100% return. If however, I use leverage and buy the club, using only 20 of my own money, and 80 of external debt, and then sell for the exact same 200, I pay back my debt of 80, and have 120 left. That is now a 6 time, 500%, return on my 20 equity invested!  BOOM!It all works beautifully until interest rates start to rise. In the last 12 months this has started to reverse. The risk-free interest rate has risen from zero to 5% in the US. Gulp. The cost of capital has risen DRAMATICALLY.That means a variety of things, all of them profound. Click here to read more.

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