The proliferation of direct-to-consumer media channels has empowered sports fans with more choices than ever before. Just in the last year, four major U.S. subscription services—B/R Live, CBS Sports HQ, ESPN+, and DAZN—have launched with multi-sport offerings, joining NBC Sports Gold, Fox Sports Go, and other streaming platforms like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter.
That list doesn’t include any number of highly specialized team-centric offerings. What’s unclear, though, is how sustainable this level of unstructured over-the-top supply can be.
“I don’t see how this fragmentation can continue,” said B/R Live GM Hania Poole at Wednesday’s NeuLion Sports Media & Technology conference in NYC sponsored by Sports Business Journal.
Poole suggested that the market will eventually consolidate “like the old world” of cable bundles. She said there will still be choice and competition, just fewer destinations. Will Staeger, NeuLion’s president of business operations agreed with the premise but added that “it’s going to be a pretty long stretch before that consolidation happens.” Staeger said more content owners will innovate and find success before the pool narrows.
Not everyone on the panel was in agreement. NBC Sports Group’s VP of direct-to-consumer services, Portia Archer, said, “I don’t see the interest in recreating what we had.”
Her comment reflects the disparate strategies of these offerings. B/R Live, for instance, was founded on the very notion of centralizing content for fan convenience, even if that meant directing a user to a competitor’s video stream. NBC Sports Gold, on the other hand, offers 11 (and soon to be 14) targeted passes for fans of certain teams or sports.
“Our customers are focused on customization and personalization,” Archer said, before later adding: “We’re really trying to deepen our relationship with the fan and super-serve that fan. We’re not trying to recreate the bundle that you might find on television. We’re really trying to create a premium experience that provides content and programming that is oftentimes not available to that consumer on linear television.”
Jeff Gerttula, the EVP and GM of CBS Sports Digital, noted that each network has its own mission statement born from its audience.
“The entire digital strategy is multi-sport,” he said, adding that CBS Sports HQ is going after that “core fan that’s multi-sport by nature.”
Bundling OTT feeds wouldn’t mean a full reenactment of the cable packages now rapidly going out of style. Users would have still have freedom within a digital platform to select a la carte options of games, leagues, and sports. But the current marketplace has few entities resembling a hub for fan convenience.
However the streaming world ends up, inherent digital nature of the DTC business will inform choices in a way that exceeds what the cable companies had at their disposal.
As Loeb & Loeb sports co-chair Brian Socolow, who represents DAZN, said, “I think the data presents a tremendous opportunity to make those decisions.”