SN1 turns to Content Arena to distribute Lega Basket international rights

SN1 Trading, the consultancy and media rights agency, will use the Content Arena platform to distribute its recently acquired international rights to the top tier of Italian domestic basketball.

Prospective buyers will be able to acquire rights to the Lega Basket Serie A league, Coppa Italia and Italian Super Cup competitions.

The rights amount to a total of 380 games per season and are available for the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons. International betting rights are not included within SN1’s offering.

SN1 was awarded the Italian basketball international rights earlier this month following an invitation to tender process run by the league’s governing body, Lega Basket.

The Lega Basket international rights were previously held by media group Discovery.

Sascha Kojic, founder of SN1 Trading and co-founder of Content Arena said today (Tuesday): “We’re excited to start this collaboration – SN1’s expertise combined with Content Arena’s global network of buyers will elevate Lega Basket’s media distribution to new heights, and help to reach more basketball fans than ever before. We also look forward to using Content Arena Rights Manager to digitise and automate our commercial and legal processes, allowing us to bring our internal process efficiency to a new level.”

Content Arena was co-founded by Kojic and Erik Lorenz, the company’s current chief executive, in 2017, along with Klemens Kögl and Bernie Riedlsperger of investor Hogmore Media, a media rights company that distributes rights to football friendlies and training camps.

Earlier this year, Content Arena secured fresh investment and a commitment of expertise from DAZN chief business development officer John Gleasure and Sportradar head of innovation Alexander Fryba.

The platform is designed to address a perceived ‘bottleneck’ in the market created by the growth in the number of both buyers and sellers as the amount of available programme increases and OTT operators and others swell the potential customer base.

Content Arena generates revenues through a commission charged to sellers on each transaction.

Lega Basket finalised its rights 2020-22 cycle sales process this month after agreeing deals for domestic free-to-air and radio, and pay-television rights with public broadcaster Rai and Discovery, respectively.

Alongside these agreements the rights-holder also completed a three-year commercial deal with the Infront agency.

Infront will now be tasked with negotiating Lega Basket’s sponsorship, marketing and digital rights as the rights-holder’s exclusive partner for these areas. The deal can be extended for a further three years if both parties are happy to do so.