Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and digital specialists the Perform Group have said that sports rights-holders are holding back the growth of mobile and internet sports consumption and as a consequence not getting the maximum value for their rights.
Talking at a TV Sports Markets webinar on the digital consumption of sport, Simon Greenberg, the global head of rights at News Corp, and Oliver Slipper, joint chief executive of Perform, said that rights-holders needed to completely separate the sale of their main live television rights from the rights to short-form online content such as clips and short highlights. Many rights-holders still sell their main television rights and all digital rights in the same packages.
“I’ve read rights-holders talking about how they are embracing digital. Well, I’m not sure they really are,” Greenberg said. “I don’t think that they fully understand it. You are never going to embrace digital properly if you keep linking it to live rights. It’s a completely separate package of rights on its own.”
He said the free market would “allow mobile and digital rights to find their own level, instead of artificially holding them back by linking them to the live rights.”
If digital rights were sold separately, specialist digital operators would be able to bid more aggressively for them without having to “rely on whether the main live broadcaster wants to carve them out, wants to enter into a partnership with you, or whatever it may be.”
In such a scenario, the value of mobile rights and internet rights would rise, he said, while the main live rights would at least hold their value or “carry on being inflationary.”
Greenberg’s view was backed by Perform’s Slipper, who said: “The split that needs to happen if a sport wants to ensure that its content is consumed and its rights are monetised to the absolute maximum is splitting the clips away from the live – you just do not want your live rights-holder warehousing clip rights and not expanding the maximum reach of those products.”
He argued that successful and creative exploitation of mobile and internet offerings would “complement the television proposition.” Far from cannibalising the value of the main live rights, as some rights-holders fear, it would “enhance the consumer experience; the value associated with the rights should rise and everyone should be a winner.”
Greenberg and Slipper were joined in the webinar Digital Sport: new platforms, new behaviours, new models by Charly Classen, the senior director of digital media, commercial and marketing for sports broadcaster ESPN in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
To download the webinar FREE follow this link: http://www.sportbusiness.com/webinar-digital-sport-new-platforms-new-behaviours-new-models?src=1310WT26DXX08
The webinar was a discussion of the findings of the Global Sports Media Consumption Report 2013. To order your copy of the report contact Scott Longhurst on +44 (0) 207 954 3484 or email scott.longhurst@tvsportsmarkets.com