Big hitters making the TV deals you’ll pay for
The answer is, of course, something of a moveable feast. Literally. One that depends on a variety of subjective factors and the most important of them being geography.
Where we come from and where we live will do most to colour opinions but, the thing is, you’re wrong regardless of your postal address.
Yep, sorry to be so blunt, but you are just way off the mark. The sports event with the greatest impact this week is not on any pitch or court near you. There isn’t a football boot or a sweaty jersey to be seen and there won’t be any medals handed out when it’s all over after four days this afternoon.
Right now, everyone who is anyone in the worldwide business of sport is scurrying around the Grimaldi Forum conference centre for something called the 25th Sportel Monaco gathering on the Cote d’Azur, where the estimated €20bn market for global TV sports rights is being sliced and diced by station executives, marketers, sponsors, sports federations, clubs, leagues, media, software giants... the lot, basically.
Fifa and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are there. So are the NFL, ESPN, HBO, NBC and beIN Sports, who are making serious inroads into the French TV market.
The list goes on. RTÉ, TV3, TG4 and Setanta are there, too, though they are relative tiddlers in an ocean of sharks looking to grab a small chunk of a pie that continues to defy the wider economic environment by mushrooming year after year.
On Wednesday, the Swiss company selling the rights for coverage to Euro 2016 in the UK and Ireland held a one-hour presentation for prospective buyers, and that scene is being replicated time and again this week on the French Riviera.
In every nook and cranny, rights are being negotiated and renegotiated, verbal agreements secured with handshakes and smiles and every decision made determines how the ordinary Joe Soap consumes it all, whether in Athlone or Asia.
The sheer scale of it all is harder to digest.
A Deloitte report at the start of this year predicted the global sports rights market would expand by 14% in 2014, with new deals for the English Premier League, Germany’s Bundesliga and Major League Baseball doing most to inflate Monopoly-type numbers that show no sign of deflating any time soon.
Last year, BT Sport raised the bar beyond the dizziest of heights when they trumped the existing £400m BSkyB and ITV deal for Champions League and Europa League rights with an offer of, wait for it, £900m. For years now, people have been suggesting the boom cannot continue without some sort of bust, or even just a levelling off, but the market continues to balloon while banks and even countries have gone belly-up.
It is an industry that looks impervious to harm.
Even the availability of goals and other action proliferating the internet through a variety of legal and not-so-legal means has failed to halt the onward charge and the big debate in Monaco this week is how to “monetise” that so-called “second screen” phenomenon, whereby people consume sport on their mobiles or computers while watching it live on TV.
It has all come a long way since the first Sportel conference in 1990 when the big question was: ‘Is sport good for TV, and is TV good for sport?’ That may seem laughably archaic now, but the second half of it requires some thought — despite the money flooding in — given the disappearance of so much sport behind the paywalls of satellite TV.
Last Monday saw the launch of rugby’s European Champions Cup in Dublin, when organisers were quizzed about the fact that Irish and UK fans will now have to fork out for two subscriptions — to BskyB and BT — if they want to catch all their province’s games over the course of the competition.
A lengthy debate took place between Paul McNaughton, a director of European Professional Club Rugby, and the assembled journalists, but the bottom line was simple: money talks.
It’s a line we have heard time and again before: from the IRFU when the Government threatened to preserve Heineken Cup fixtures for terrestrial TV and the English and Welsh Cricket Board when similar moves were suggested by Westminster.
That is to name but two.
How ironic that sport, a pastime for the masses, is being used as a plaything for the wealthy few: both those buying and selling the rights to show it on our screens and those consumers with incomes sufficiently large enough to justify the added expense that comes with ensuring its availability in their living rooms.
Make no mistake, your viewing patterns for the foreseeable future have just been decided in Monaco.
And it is going to cost you.
Email: brendanobrien@examiner.ie
Twitter: @Rackob
