RH, do you think this is a new trend as sports are now seeing the risks that streaming services have now introduced in that it can split broadcasting a sport across several providers so you may have "a sport product" carved up and broadcast by several means which managed poorly could lock out supporters based on what subscriptions or access they have? On top of that as it's not a bulk lot and not exclusive rights (to that support product) the value is diminished in the eyes of broadcasters?
Example of a current good split and how complex it can get: NFL has deals with CBS, NBC (owned by Comcast), Fox, and ESPN (owned by Disney/Hearst). Fox has full rights, the other 3 have Sunday night football rights and annually rotating rights to the Super Bowl. Additionally ESPN has Monday night rights and Fox exclusive Thursday night rights. Then you have Verizon and Amazon with different levels of streaming rights.
Great points and facts mst.
To me it's mostly a plus sum game for sports
assuming they have the business and technology nous to optimise for their code the mixed use of FTA, Pay TV, IP-based OTT sub services as you reference.
There is audience overlap of course amongst these delivery modalities but there are also genuinely different sub-markets and consumer-type demographies with different consumptive characteristics lying in wait that, if captured, can expand the total reach of a code in eyeballs terms and thus the monetisable gross no of eyeballs and thus the advertising and/or subscription revenues that can be built off that.
For example: There are age-based market 'cut' dynamics: Millennials and Gen X are obvious naturals for IP-based services running on multiple devices, they have left FTA behind and Pay TV largely locks down to a street address and is immobile. In contrast the more affluent over-50s are still a strong FTA market in general. Then there is a 'casual vs obsessive' fan cut of the market - demos that will be happy to watch a big game occasionally on their favourite pizza and sofa night and that's all they want vs consumers who just want huge helpings of a code 24/7 (see the dedicated Aust Fox AFL channels for example). Another cut is 'single vs multi sports on show', consumers that love all main sports and want all the courses for dinner so to speak vs those who really just love one or maybe two codes and that's all they want.
These differences in market cut drive enhanced economic opportunities for a sports code; in fact, put another way, a sports code will likely suffer in global market share terms if it does not seek to execute media strategies that exploit all of these market types simultaneously. The best run sports codes (rugby is not one) know this and are already acting on it big time in a way that has made them richer and more globally powerful.
Then on top we have the key techno-economic fact that, unlike FTA and cable or sat Pay TV, IP-based services require no specialised transmission infrastructure and dedicated TVs the end. More or less the consumer pays for the transmission service and does not need a dedicated display device at the end of the line - this radically changes the cost economics of sports delivery and thus radically changed the media-buying landscape for sports rights and this alone has its major impacts on monetisation strategies for sports owners - they can start to deliver and produce their own dedicated visualisation material (live and recorded) and s
ell their sports direct to consumers, they don't any more require 'distributors' with fixed infrastructure. Plus this too which is highly important: IP infrastructure is globally pervasive and technologically and in standards terms homogenous whereas FTA and Pay TV largely required differentiated and capital-costly delivery systems in each main geography. So instant, always-on, 24/7 global reach for a sports code is possible in far more flexible and cost-effective ways than in the pre-IP era.
Next, the most central fact of all in this realm - just as a huge global population gets more affluent and desires more material goods, better food, etc, so it has proved to be a law of entertainment appetite that mass affluence brings, surprise, surprise, an increasingly large mass global market demand pattern for live sports, both big codes and niche codes. The US NFL and NBA and the UK EPL have exploited this simple fact brilliantly. This global mass market expansion brings with it a huge, rapidly expanding eyeballs market that, as per the analysis of market consumer types above, is splintered via age, geo factors and technology flexibility etc all of which can be exploited most optimally by a smart delivery mix of FTA, Pay TV and IP services. The bigger and better run big sporting codes are running hard with this opportunity.
So, to come back to your question above, 'split' sports code delivery modalities are largely a plus sum game for those codes that are ahead of the curve. There is maybe some 'loss of density' (as you surmised) coming with the split but the macro market reach gain from a well-managed split of delivery and packaging modes more than exceeds that loss risk.
A relevant side point to this discussion: the above factors, all of them, are precisely why a smart PE investor like CVC Capital is marrying up with rugby - it wants to (a) exploit all of the above global trends as rugby is a global game (with China, Japan and the US building appetite for it) and (b) leverage the fact that, mostly, World Rugby and the national RUs have not been smart enough to do it all for themselves and therein, with (a) and (b) combined, lies a big capital value growth play.