Mark Tatum, Deputy Commissioner and Chief Operating Officer of the NBA, described the league’s strategy to the World Economic Forum: We’ve launched an NBA 2022 competition, an esports form of the game with players streaming from their homes. We’ve expedited production to bring forward the release of a Michael Jordan documentary. We’re hosting live quarantine parties on social media with current and former players, and we’re showing classic games every night – all things to continue to engage our fans during this time.
You can listen to our full interview with the NBA's Mark Tatum, here Another approach is to increase the flexibility of payment options for consumers seeking sports content. The NBA and Turner Sports have removed the paywall for their joint streaming subscription service, League Pass. Major League Baseball is doing the same, offering its archive of games for free on MLB.TV and YouTube. The Premier League is probably wishing that its streaming channel, planned for 2022, was already available.
Discussions are taking place between sports bodies and TV network partners to find mutual solutions to force majeure clauses that work for both sides. These include leagues paying broadcasters compensation, granting them additional rights, and extending agreements. The issues are replicated further down the value chain in the Premier League, and commercial agreements at the club level are likely to need tweaking too. Some sports associations are already affected by shortfalls collegiate men’s basketball teams have announced a more than 50% drop in income, and Premier League clubs are bracing themselves for 60 dollars per 150 m in lost revenues. According to Tatum, Our broadcasting partners are really understanding, and we’re working with them on different forms of content. It’s not just the NBA, it’s all live sports millions of fans around the world are looking for content. We’re working closely with our broadcasting, digital, and marketing partners to find ways to engage at this time. The TV revenue imperative is why many leagues are developing contingency plans for games without live audiences. The western leagues will be looking to Asia, the region first affected by the crisis, to see how it responded. Japan’s baseball teams played in empty stadiums for weeks. China’s professional basketball league delayed the start of its season, while Korea’s canceled their entirely. Options also include playing matches in areas less affected by COVID-19 and moving training facilities and even isolating entire teams and their management staff to a single area, as the MLA and NRL are rumored to be doing. There is precedent for physical moves like this: MLB teams have previously temporarily relocated operations in the wake of hurricane damage in the US.
Looking to the long-term, the basic operating model of sports leagues should remain unchanged. The leagues will still organize the same way – via a competitive season of pre-defined length, with every team playing each other. However, the coronavirus pandemic underlines how dependent this model is on TV broadcasting and live audiences.
This in turn will reduce broadcasters’ advertising income and their power to purchase sports rights. For the sports industry, the likely knock-on effect is that leagues will increasingly look to their in-house services to sell content, as well as potentially making more, smaller deals with other digital players. Amazon has shown proof of concept: subscribers to its Prime Video service in the UK increased by 35% in the Q4 of 2019, coinciding with its first-ever live-streaming, of Premier League games.
You must be logged in to post a comment.