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BT Sport loses UFC rights


Art Vandelay

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STV Player, Scotland's ITV, mainly has ITV but has things like Taggart & Take the high road old episodes. Live streamed the full of Serie A & LA Liga last week for free, I have the app on my youview box but had to go to the online app to watch Barca Vs Athletico, anyway from now on they will live stream a game in each league a week for free from Eleven Sports, so I could see them putting a fight card every now and then on there, think the free games also stream on Facebook.

Eleven Sports are also starting a Skype style thing were you and 3 other homes get to watch the matches and can chat and shit through it, I think only one home has to pay for it. That would be fine if the fights were on at normal times or a Conor-Khabib style mega fight when more casual fans are watching but most aren't interested in the normal PPVs and events.

http://www.sportspromedia.com/news/eleven-sports-watch-together-social-viewing

Edited by the_mole
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On 7/31/2018 at 11:42 AM, David said:

Ask yourself, seriously, what fans are going to buy this ElevenSports app for eight quid so they can stream an event at 3am when there's plenty of free or less costly streaming offerings out there?

It seems the answer was "not a lot, really."

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I have BT with my broadband but BT seem to be cutting back on sports rights, they let Series A & NBA leave already, SPFL next year or two is going exclusive to Sky and they have lower tier premier league games in the next TV deal and I wonder if they can hold on to the champions league, those are still a year or two away though.

ITV just signed PBC boxing to an exclusive contract I don't know if they would have the space to run both, as they sometimes go head to head  I wouldn't mind it on there or even Sky Sports. I think any way they will have occasional PPVs, be it Sky, BT or ITV, probably not every month though. 

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Personally I have been very happy with Eleven Sports for what I paid for it, but it was always going to be a struggle for them to attract a sustainable number of subscribers to pay for what must be very expensive content without access to bigger platforms. It's no surprise whatsoever that they haven't been able to secure a deal to get on TV, but they haven't even managed to get Smart TV,  Amazon Fire TV or Roku apps. You'd think those negotiations would be far more straightforward and absolutely essential if you're trying to position yourself as a 'Netflix of sports'. It works a treat streaming from my phone to the TV via Chromecast, but so far that's the only platform they have managed to get support for, which just isn't good enough.

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It’s not massively surprising. They hinged their UK model on being able to act as a ‘landlord’ of Sports rights - buy them at a premium, carve them up and rent the linear rights individually to TV stations at a premium.

Might have worked in a less myopic market, but there’s only 2 things that make money in the UK sports media industry:

1) British Football

2) Complete exclusivity of a niche right that you can monetise with subs and adverts.

Trying to sell something that wasn’t British football and trying to retain the digital rights was never, ever going to work.

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7 minutes ago, d-d-d-dAz said:

Trying to sell something that wasn’t British football and trying to retain the digital rights was never, ever going to work.

What happened to them "setting themselves up as a solid niche"?

You seemed very high on them when they first arrived on the scene, claiming they'd have channels, now it was never, ever going to work?

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See Point B.

I'm not privy to their financials - i'd assumed they'd done their costings and could be financially solvent by establishing a niche audience, monetising via modest subscriptions and adverts - and yes, maybe even having their own channels on linear TV.

It seems that their overheads didn't make that possible, and their business plan was based around renting the rights - something they, obviously, didn't announce at launch. Had I known that in order to work they had to take their niche rights and then try and sublicense them non-exclusively, i'd have said they were crazy. You can't rely on sublicense deals, that's insane. Those sorts of deals should just happen organically, and be a nice extra revenue stream. Being reliant on something you can't guarantee is only ever going to end one way.

Edited by d-d-d-dAz
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1 hour ago, WyattSheepMask said:

If the UFC are staying with BT, does that mean the PPVs will stay on a 2 Day Delay on Fight Pass?

You'd expect BT would want the previous deal they had in place, and possibly at a better rate due to them leaving and coming back. Not heard anything concrete yet from my inside BT Source

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