Will sports rights holders "on-demand" even more from broadcasters and how may contracts evolve?

You would have had to have gone into hiding when Andrea Pirlo's extraordinary chip kick penalty led to England's exit of Euro 2012 and not come out again until Mario Balotelli's header sent England to their second successive Italian tournament defeat at World Cup Brazil 2014, to not know that the UK sports television market has seen unprecedented change in recent years. Now, unlike ever before, channel providers are in a battle over rights to premium sporting content.

 

Traditionally, those providers paid rights holders a lump sum for content for a certain limited period and simply carried it on their linear channels. Over time, however, premium sporting content has become used by the main UK platforms as part of a fight to win more customers for their fibre optic broadband packages and to generate profits in increasingly innovative ways. In recent years we have seen: