Sport and media rights – the year in review 2018/19

“I’ve spoken about the Premier League becoming the ‘Netflix of football’, i.e., the video on demand platform that controls its own product. If you had 100 million subscribers on ‘Premier League TV’ like with Netflix at £8 a month, you’d be bringing in £10bn a year, not £8.7bn every three years like the current deal does.”1

This suggestion from the former Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan was reported in the Evening Standard newspaper in February of this year. After getting over the amusement of seeing something referred to as the “Netflix of [insert product]” for the umpteenth time, I wanted to give the proposal deeper consideration. For someone who consumes probably almost all of his sports content through “OTT” (over-the-top) services and has a clear history of trumpeting the benefits of distributing sports content through connected devices, my initial reaction was surprisingly negative – why was that?

In reality, it was nothing to do with the merits of the Premier League considering moving down a direct to consumer path via an OTT service (which is an option that certainly merits consideration), but that it took what is actually an incredibly complex question, one made even more difficult by market-by-market nuances, and turned it into a simple and unrealistic piece of arithmetic.

The direct to consumer broadcast question is one facing all sports properties at the moment. Thus, it feels like an appropriate time to use the Sport and Media Rights “Year in Review” to dig a bit deeper into the question of selling media rights to intermediaries as against taking the OTT route. Given the Simon Jordan suggestion, we can walk through some of the factors that the Premier League would likely consider when contemplating whether to turn their back on the incredible source of revenue that the pay television market has been over almost 30 years to jump into the world of OTT.