NFL follows its fans beyond live television
TORONTO • Despite a slip in Super Bowl viewership this year, the National Football League’s championship game continued its reign as the most- watched live television program in Canada and the United States.
But the NFL must contend with changes to its business model as mass TV audiences fragment and fans shift from broadcast television to online streaming, says Mary Ann Turcke, the league’s president of digital media and the NFL Network.
“We say in media, we follow our fans,” Turcke said at a Royal Bank of Canada event in Toronto last week at which she discussed the NFL’s digital strategy and business model.
“We’ve got to go where they are and reverse engineer the monetization model underneath it,” said Turcke, who was president of Bell Media until she joined the NFL in February 2017.
In a fragmented market, the relative quality of content is what becomes most important, Turcke said. “The more people around the world that watch football, the better we are.”
As such, the NFL signed a deal with Facebook in September to publish game video recaps on the social network that boasts more t han t wo bill i on ac t i ve monthly users.
“I really think that you cannot give up the reach that those global platforms have, you just can’t,” Turcke said of the deal with Facebook, where she said the highlight videos have been successful.
The licensing deal doesn’t replace dollar- f or- dollar what the NFL earned on its owned and operated digital content, she said, but over time she sees the benefit of acquiring new fans and retaining fans who use this platform.
The NFL also signed oneyear deals, first with Twitter and then with Amazon last season, to live-stream Thursday Night Football games in the U. S. The league sees Thursday events as a “petri dish” to play with different platforms and broadcasters, Turcke said.
Amazon was a “fantastic partner” given its tremendous reach, she said. Amazon attracted more than 300,000 viewers per game, according to Sport-Techie. That’s a mere fraction of the approximately 15 million viewers who tune in every game on t elevision, but Turcke said the NFL learned from working with the platform.
“As we think about the future and disruption and everything we’re talking about here, they’re the kind of people you want to be able to talk about those things with,” she said.
Amazon, Twitter and YouTube are in the midst of bidding millions of dollars for the online streaming rights for next season, according to Bloomberg.
In Canada, London-based DAZN ( pronounced “da zone”) bought the exclusive rights to live stream NFL Red-Zone and NFL Sunday Ticket games for five years. It had a rough first season, with fans frustrated by poor streaming quality and time lags that kicked off the season.
Turcke did not mention DAZN during the Toronto event. NFL spokespeople did not respond to requests for a comment on the status of the relationship or what Canadian fans can expect for live streaming next season.
For DAZN’s part, it made investments to improve its service. In October, it announced partnerships with cable companies Shaw, Rogers, SaskTel and Eastlink to offer the games on television to appease fans that didn’t want to watch online. It would not elaborate on its plans for partnerships for next season.
“We are open to opportunities that support our strategy, at this point in time there is nothing new to share,” DAZN spokesman Paulo Senra said in a statement Thursday.
DAZN, which in January acquired the Canadian rights to stream the PGA Tour and NatWest 6 Nations Rugby Championship, is just one of many players trying to crack the live sports market.
It’s technically difficult to stream live sports to audiences that don’t tolerate delays, especially not during the playoffs.
Live sports continue to entice people to buy TV packages to avoid s uch blips, but the technology is improving.
“Clearly there were some bumps for DAZN in its first year of streaming in Canada, but for live sports many streamers including Amazon, DirecTV Now, Hulu, PlayStation, Sling and Yahoo have all faced and continue to face issues,” said Brahm Eiley of Convergence Research.
“Despite these issues we expect to see more over-thetop sports deals going forward,” Eiley said.
Eiley expects Amazon to be a key player to watch out for in the sports arena. Last year, Amazon won rights for the NFL and the Association of Tennis Professionals.
The shift online isn’t expected to hurt overall profitability for Canadian communications giants, whose profits are increasingly driven by the internet.
“While cord- cutting and shaving reduces media redistribution fees, overall profitability will be maintained in 2018-19 as internet- related revenues fill the gap,” Moody’s analyst Bill Wolfe wrote this week in a report on Canada’s broadband industry.
“Successful strategies will require state- of- theart networks to cater to the consumer’s preference for on- demand video, implying continuing investment in last-mile infrastructure.”