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| Mobile content’s sporting chance |
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| Thursday, 15 March 2007 | |
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Television has seen sport as a strategic asset in the battle for ratings for many years. Broadcasters have invested heavily to secure rights to major events and tournaments. The International Olympic Committee, for example, has seen its television revenues rise from $88 million for Moscow 1984 to $1493 million for Athens 2004 with $1706 forecast for Beijing.
In many countries, sport has been the foundation upon which new television companies have built business plans as new entrants in markets previously dominated by public service or commercial terrestrial broadcasters. The increasingly widespread availability of 3G, with improving video capability is inevitably focussing the attention of mobile operators onto sport as a source of compelling content. The marriage of sport and mobile is nothing new. Goal alerts and match results by text are widely consumed: text alerts are believed to be worth £75 million a year to England’s FA Premier League alone. According to mobile market analysts m:metrics, sport makes up one fifth of news and media offered on operator portals in the US, ahead of current affairs and entertainment news. However, mobile operators seeking to expand their portfolio of sporting content are confronted by a market in a state of flux as sports bodies, broadcasters, cable companies, internet service providers and regulators come to terms with an increasingly digital multimedia world. Video content is now distributed via broadband, cellular and broadcast mobile, satellite, and analogue or digital terrestrial television let alone DVDs and a growing range of memory cards, and can be consumed on a plethora of devices including games consoles and multimedia players as well as PCs, mobile phones and television sets. To date, soccer, with its near-universal appeal, has been the primary focus of the mobile community. Yet, the long tail theory suggests that “minority” sports should be able to stimulate mobile traffic assuming compelling content is offered and operators can help users find it easily. Relatively low set-up costs have seen a number of sport-specific internet TV channels emerge and prosper over the past year suggesting that even niche sports can attract loyal audiences. Rights trends Speaking in London at the Sport on Mobile TV conference organised by SportBusiness, in November 2006, James Pickles, editor of TV Sports Markets summarised current key trends in sports rights. While operators such as 3 Italy and 3 UK were among first movers with strategic investments in their respective domestic soccer leagues, subsequent licensing rounds have seen fees fall as operators have realised that the premium for exclusivity does not necessarily generate a corresponding return in terms of subscriber acquisition, retention or improved ARPU. Choice of network still appears to be driven primarily by the perceived value of voice and text bundles: access to specific content is only of secondary importance. In the UK, 3 UK and Vodafone shared non-exclusive rights in the FA Premier League’s second licensing round for 2004-2007. For 2007-2010, the Premier League mobile rights have been secured on an exclusive basis not by a mobile operator, but by a satellite broadcaster. [see chart] In a move that may be followed by other broadcasters, BskyB is rapidly transforming itself into a multi-media company capable of distributing its own content via satellite, broadband and mobile. The company’s Sky Mobile TV, launched with Vodafone UK in 2005 is now available to other operators and was launched by 3 UK in November 2006. Sky’s ambition to make its content available across mobile is highlighted by the fact that it is already delivering at least some of its news and sport content via 3G video, SMS, WAP or MMS with all five UK operators. Platforms or windows The way sports rights are packaged is also changing. In the past, rights were often defined by technology platform. However convergence is blurring boundaries – is a laptop fitted with a 3G or HSDPA data card covered by mobile or broadband rights? According to Richard McMorris, senior assistant at media law firm Wiggins LLP, “The way rights were defined five years ago no longer works.” The implication is that defining rights by device or platform risks being out-of-date within the lifetime of new agreements. While there is a discernable trend towards packaging rights by time window - live, near-live, highlights and archive - in the mobile context a distinction is also being drawn between devices capable of two-way communication with which users can request a unicast stream and mobile broadcast rights. In a study of the results of eight mobile TV pilots, the Broadcast Mobile Convergence Forum (BMCF), which promotes a worldwide open market for mobile broadcast services, found that sport ranked third after news/information and drama series/soap operas in the genres prospective customers wanted in their mobile broadcast services. The BMCF also found that users tended to watch sports content for longer than other genres. Not surprisingly, interest in sport was heightened during high profile sporting events such as the Winter Olympics or FIFA World Cup in 2006. Germany 2006 was a significant milestone in the delivery of a major event over mobile. By zooming-in to the widescreen, high definition broadcast feed using “pan & scan” techniques, the host broadcaster created new media packages better suited to small mobile displays. Fifty organisations secured World Cup mobile rights covering more than 100 territories. According to TV Sports Markets, World Cup mobile rights were worth about five per cent of overall TV rights deals and rose to 10-15 per cent in the most competitive football-mad markets such as Italy, Japan and Korea. To date, collated mobile consumption figures have not been published. However, with the same new media packages being viewed 125 million times via the official website, www.FIFAworldcup.com, mobile operators need to recognise that mobile services could encounter at least some competition online. In his report Mobile Sport & Leisure Content, Bruce Gibson of Juniper Research observed, “End-user experience in some markets of mobile sports content services built around the 2006 FIFA World Cup has not been consistently good. First impressions count for a lot and particularly with time sensitive content like goal alerts and replays, the first experience has to be good to generate repeat business.” The report did however conclude that between 2006 and 2011, the cumulative revenue for sport-based mobile content services would be $15.283 billion. Premium TV is experiencing growing demand for one-stop-shop provision of broadband video and mobile services from clients such as football clubs, the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and World Rally Championships. At Sport on Mobile TV, Oliver Slipper, Premium’s CEO, identified the key drivers of sport consumption on mobile as live events and access to archive footage that allow fans to re-live key moments in the history of their team. Highlights coverage also has greater appeal to people on the move than to broadband users. For mobile, Slipper believes pay-per-clip will be more successful than subscription and reckons there is a major opportunity for a sports-aggregation play addressing the clips market although most operator data charging regimes currently count against off-portal services. Will Muirhead, founder of Sportev, distributor of sport content to more than 60 network operators in 41 territories, believes with the conversion of the SMS alert into the video alert still in its infancy, the sports industry would be better-off pushing in-game video alerts, not currently permitted by many rights-holders, before focussing too heavily on live mobile broadcast. He also observes that user generated content, currently the darling of venture capitalists, is largely un-tapped by sport. “While most of the 40,000 views of an incident in a stadium are likely to be awful, some will be gems,” he suggests. “Near-live is king,” said Jacques Henri Eyraud, of Groupe Sporever a French mobile sport company. “Traffic on near-live services is ten times greater than delayed transmission.” Eyraud observed that despite limited purchasing power, which limits handset choice and usage, the 15-25 year old demographic drives video consumption. Pointing to opportunities for minority sports, extreme sports have proved quite successful for Groupe Sporever. In Europe, EU regulation will impact service propositions and business models. Television Without Frontiers, Content Online and the implications of converging media for sports rights have all been subject to recent scrutiny by Brussels with a view to formulating policy and regulation. Servecast, an Irish provider of subscription webcasting and mobile services to clubs including Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Barcelona, highlighted diversity of video formats and delivery methods, expensive data charging models and carrier interoperability issues as current mobile TV limitations. However, forecasting that video-enabled handsets will grow to more than 500 million worldwide by 2011, Kevin Qunn, Servecast’s head of sports & media, remains confident that “Sport is the premium content” and, along with breaking news, the only content that will be consumed live. In spite of all the excitement surrounding mobile video, Line Up Call from Globalmouth in Sweden is enjoying considerable success with a revenue-share model that enables sports clubs to interact with their fan bases through voice. Before each game, the team coach records a voicemail announcing the starting line-up and match strategy. Globalmouth delivers the message at a pre-set time by automatically dialling all subscribing fans. The service has been adopted by many of Sweden’s leading soccer and ice-hockey clubs and is attracting interest in other countries. Voice cannot be overlooked as a source of innovative content. Caption for chart “English Premier League Mobile Rights” Premier League mobile rights fell following Hutchison’s initial exclusive deal for 2001-04 as Vodafone and 3 were content with non-exclusive rights for 2004-07. BskyB has secured exclusivity for 2007-10 but is likely to seek to make its service available to all UK mobile users – as of January 2007, its Sky Mobile TV service is already offered by both Vodafone UK and 3 UK. |
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