Sports streaming faces rising costs of broadcast rights

To this departure will be added the Concacaf Champions Cup tournament due to non-compliance with broadcast rights payments that has escalated to a lawsuit from the Confederation of North America, Central America and the Caribbean Football (Concacaf) itself. The company is currently facing financial problems in meeting its contractual obligations.

Expansión requested information from Fox Sports about the loss of sports leagues and the options it has to compensate subscribers who still have its service, but did not comment.

Experts consulted by this medium assured that streaming companies will face greater challenges to obtain sports broadcasting rights because it has become one of the key assets for the platforms’ business, as it is the content most requested by audiences.

“It will be increasingly difficult for any platform to have the exclusivity of a single sports league because the rights to broadcast the games are being dispersed and the teams themselves prefer to sell their matches to different windows so that their matches are not seen. only in Mexico but in other countries,” explained Claudia Benassini, specialist in restricted television and digital platforms and researcher at La Salle University.

The transmission of a sports match depends completely on the soccer teams, since they are the owners of those rights and those who sign the contracts with television stations and streaming companies. These types of agreements can last a year or even six months.

Marco Liceaga, executive vice president of sports rights acquisitions and commercial associations at TelevisaUnivision, acknowledged that the acquisition of sports content has become more complex and expensive, since more than four platforms want the same league “and this generates inflation in sports properties.” more relevant.”

“When the company wants to buy something, I always warn the managers of the risks of not making a good evaluation of the content they want to acquire, that is why before buying a package of rights we review the ratings of each league to be clear about the return on investment and the possibility of gaining more subscribers,” explained Liceaga within the framework of the Nextv Series México forum last year.

The manager even recalled the case of a platform that acquired two packages of European soccer rights for a ‘stratospheric’ amount and after two years did not know what to do with that league, “and all because it made a bad evaluation.”

The migration of sporting events to streaming is a strategy increasingly adopted by companies worldwide, in response to the way in which audiences consume this type of content today.

30% of streaming subscribers in Mexico pay for on-demand sports services, which positions the country as one of the most avid markets in the region for this type of product. According to the Bango Latam Consumer consultancy. In addition, the Research and Markets firm projects that the global sports streaming market will reach a value of $87 billion by 2028.

Radamés Camargo, an analyst at the consulting firm The Ciu, said that the situation that the platforms themselves are going through to obtain sports content is just an example of how sports broadcasts will continue to fragment, resulting in greater problems for audiences who increasingly have to search where to watch their teams’ matches, but also at an increasingly higher cost, because in the end the surcharges for transmission rights are passed on to consumers.