Sports leagues to compete directly for online viewers

Online streaming services offered directly by professional sports leagues will increasingly compete for viewers as online and mobile video consumption grows, analysts say. Over the past decade, major North American sports leagues such as the NHL, the NFL and Major League Baseball have launched online subscriber services that allow fans to watch live, streaming games. NHL GameCenter Live offers fans an entire season of live NHL hockey games for $170. Baseball’s MLB.tv basic service starts at $100 US per year, or $20 US per month. The premium plan, which provides feeds suitable for mobile devices and other features, goes for $115 US a year or $25 US per month. The NFL offers an online service called NFL Game Pass, which has been around since 2006 and available in Canada since 2010. During the 2011-2012 NFL season, a full season of access to Game Pass cost $280 US. Sports packages are also available through over-the-top streaming platforms like Roku Inc.’s device, which launched in Canada this year. Roku users can subscribe to full season of MLB games for $125 or a month’s worth for $25. Brian Schecter, a media analyst with consulting firm Puddle Duck Productions, said delivering live sports events to fans directly over the Internet will become a bigger part of each leagues’ business plan. He said leagues like the NHL and NFL see consumers turning to the Internet for their TV viewing and want to capitalize on that segment of the audience. “The universe is getting more and more fractured, and there are different ways that people access content,” Schecter said in an interview. “The leagues have figured out that this is a revenue-generating mechanism.” Schecter said many people are becoming wary of paying for large cable or satellite packages in which they only watch a fraction of the channels they pay for. “As the cost of your monthly service keeps going up and up and up, there comes a point where people are saying, ‘Hey, I’m not paying for that anymore. It’s too much money for what I’m getting,’” he said. Nili Doft, the NHL’s director of digital marketing, said in an interview that NHL GameCenter Live caters to two types of consumers. One is what he called the “displaced hockey fan” who lives outside the broadcasting market of the team they want to watch. “If I am a Rangers fan living in Vancouver, this product would allow me to watch all of the Rangers games that presumably are not shown in Canada on a national broadcast,” Doft said. The other set of subscribers, he said, “are the avid hockey fans who simply can’t get enough hockey.” Doft said the NHL minimizes how much it competes with its broadcasting partners by blacking out online feeds for local games, or those covered by regional or national broadcasts. “Any game that’s not shown in local market or on national TV, they’ll have access to through the product,” he said. He said NHL GameCentre Live doesn’t carry any NHL playoff games in Canada, because those games are always broadcast nationally. Like other leagues, the NHL would not disclose how much money it has earned from its live streaming service in recent years or how many subscribers the service has, but a league official said subscriber numbers and earnings had roughly doubled between this season and last. In the more traditional cable and subscription TV market, cablecos and other TV service providers have long sought to capitalize on die-hard fans who are willing to pay extra to have access to more live coverage of their favourite sports and teams. They sell specialized sports channels and packages that offer television package subscribers access to out-of-market NHL, NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball games. For Rogers Communications Inc., all of those services are available in a bundle with a pair of other sports-themed specialty channels for $36 per month, the company’s website says. Content distributors have battled over the rights to distribute games over mobile devices in recent years. In January 2011, Telus Corp. filed a CRTC complaint alleging that rival telco BCE Inc. had granted itself an “undue preference” by securing the exclusive right to distribute mobile versions of NHL and NFL games in Canada. In March, telecom research firm Juniper Research said the average consumer will watch more than three hours of mobile TV per month on tablet devices by 2014. Howard Bloom, publisher of the Sports Business News website, said the development of mobile television ensures that live streaming will become a bigger part of the sports business in the future. “We live in a mobile society,” he said in an interview. “With wireless technology, with more and more broadband access, certainly it’s something consumers want.” Despite the trends, he said he doubts there will be a time when online streaming becomes a bigger priority for professional sports than securing broadcast deals because “there’s too much money” in the latter. Stephen McArdle, the NHL’s senior vice-president of business development, said the league’s online streaming service is partly a response to fans’ desire to have access to games on their mobile devices. “We think portability really is the future,” he said. “As devices — smartphones, tablets, et cetera—continue to grow in such rapid numbers, fans are really expecting to be able to take their broadcasts with them wherever it is that they go with these devices that enable that viewing.” Dan Masonson, the NFL’s director of corporate communications, said the NFL is also “committed to taking advantage of innovate new technologies to bring more football” to its fans. The NFL teamed up with NBCUniversal this year to live stream the Super Bowl for the first time in the league’s history. The event established a North American online viewing record for a single-game sporting event, with 2.1 million unique visitors tuning into the online feed during the game, NBCUniversal said. news@thewirereport.ca

Sports leagues to compete directly for online viewers

Broadcast | May 23, 2012

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