Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t directly answer a question about his company’s plans for bidding on sports rights but distilled their very ethos and mass appeal when describing the content he would like to include under the social media site’s Watch tab.
“We’re going to focus our products on all the ways to build community around the video people share and watch,” he said in his opening statement on Wednesday’s third-quarter earnings call. “That’s something Facebook can uniquely do.”
In his one invocation of the s-word, Zuckerberg said sports (and television shows) “create a greater sense of belonging than many other communities” and that live videos spark interactions at a rate that’s tenfold that of recorded pieces.
“Well, I think the answer to that is we don’t know all the answers around what kinds of content are going to work and are not, so we will probably experiment with a number of different things,” he said in response to the sports question.
Facebook has already dabbled in the live sports streaming media rights picture, landing rights for some Major League Baseball games and Champions League soccer matches as well as Mexican soccer league, Major League Soccer, NBA G-League and smaller conference football. Notably, Facebook bid $600 million (unsuccessfully) to stream the Indian Premier League professional cricket tour and has been the subject of much attention around upcoming English Premier League rights. The NFL’s mobile rights, currently held by Verizon, are due up after this season, too.
As the Wall Street Journal reported last year, Facebook allocated some $50 million to 140 media companies and celebrities to produce live video, of which $4.4 million was earmarked to athletes and sports properties — especially soccer. FC Barcelona was slated to receive about $1 million of that sum, with Real Madrid nabbing a little more than $900,000.
“We can drive great benefit to broadcasters, leagues, rights holders, and teams because they can access this huge fan base,” Facebook’s head of sports, Dan Reed, said at a media industry conference in April. “You can market to those people in a variety of ways.”
After all, consider the scope of these sports fan demographics: 106 million people follow the official Real Madrid page, and there are about 300,000 groups dedicated to the Cristiano Ronaldo-led club. Barcelona has 103.6 million likes, Manchester United has 73 million, Chelsea has 47 million and Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain both have more than 30 million. Its stated plans to build community around sports was apparent through the launch of Facebook Sports Stadium last year.
Digiday reported that Facebook inquired with the UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, about receiving free reign to stream Champions League matches to countries and continents (such as India, Colombia and Africa) where there is no alternative broadcast deal. Facebook made the case based on bolstering overall fan engagement and interest, but UEFA declined.
“Facebook will almost certainly bid on major sports rights so it’s a question of when rather then if,” Misha Sher, vice president of sport and entertainment at MediaCom, wrote in an email. “I believe it will happen in the next 12-18 months and it will disrupt the way these rights have traditionally been sold. I think the recent bid for the IPL rights is a clear indication of their ambition. Facebook will want to lead in disrupting this space and the upcoming Premier League rights will likely be their first bet in this space.”
Zuckerberg spoke about building a “behavior” for Facebook users to consider going to the site and expecting to watch video.
“We’re talking with a lot of broadcasters and rights holders about how they can use our products and platforms, like Watch on Facebook, to distribute live sports events in a way that’s good for them and good for our business,” Reed said at a recent conference.
The tech giant also announced plans for a new virtual reality feature for the Oculus called Venues, which will create shared experiences with others watching the same content. One can easily imagine that sports would be a natural fit.
“If you’re a pay-TV platform, you are very worried about the ability of a whole host of people to bid,” Mostyn Goodwin, a partner at OC&C Strategy Consultants in London, told Bloomberg Businessweek.