The Sports Broadcasting Market

Abstract

Over the last couple of decades, the sale of broadcast, and particularly television, rights for sporting events and competitions has become an extremely profitable activity, giving birth to a global industry worth about $30 billion (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2011). Increased competition between broadcasters has inflated rights fees for many popular sports, which, in turn, has fundamentally altered the nature of these sports. For many sports organisations, selling their broadcast rights has become their main business activity and source of revenue. As discussed in more detail later in the book, regulatory changes (see Chapters 5 and 6) and new developments in technology (see below) have both fundamentally altered the supply and exploitation of sports programming, most notably triggering a struggle for platform leadership between rival broadcasters. In Europe, pay-TV operators started to outbid free-to-air broadcasters for key sports rights and began to provide extensive live coverage of a whole variety of sports events. More recently, convergent media players, including cable operators, telecommunications firms and online video platforms have emerged as potentially significant players in the sports broadcasting market. Desperately looking for a competitive edge, multimedia companies increasingly regard sports rights (or at least access to sports programming) as key to the overall value of their delivery platform and as a means to drive the take-up of bundled telecommunication and broadcasting services — thus highlighting the changing technological context in which sports rights are sold and exploited.