Live sports, hot in streaming war
Telecast tech is still dodgy but major players take the plunge into money-spinner market
New York, Oct. 29: Streaming services have long focused on series and movies, but as online TV competition heats up could live sports — historically a bit player on these platforms — change the game?
Amazon is the sole established player to have invested in sports so far, and it has done so only tentatively, buying some rights to the NFL, Premier League and ATP tennis.
Netflix and Hulu have yet to take the plunge.
“(Sports) generate the best audiences,” said Patrick Rishe, professor of sports economics at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, describing it as one of the last “bastions” of live content.
Live matches are set to be key to platforms about to be launched by WarnerMedia and Disney.
WarnerMedia said in July that its HBO Max service will air NBA basketball and Major League
Baseball when it goes online, expected sometime early next year.
Randall Stephenson, CEO of parent company AT&T, one of the largest wireless operators and a major pay TV provider, said live sports would be “an important element” of the platform.
Walt Disney Co. already shook up the established order in April 2018 with ESPN + -- an on-demand version of its vast network of sports channels, which is the largest in the world.
It is about to do so again when it launches a new platform on November 12 called Disney +.
There is also a technical reason for the cautious approach.
“It takes a lot of infrastructure and the infrastructure is not there right now. The ability to stream concurrently to a large number of people can only be done by a few services,” Skipper, the ex-ESPN head, told CNBC in November.
Technical glitches have impacted the screening of some sports. An ESPN live stream of a 2014 football World Cup match between the USA and Germany crashed due to high demand.
Disney, aware that problems occur, spent $2.6 billion in 2017 to take control of BAMTech Media, a company that has expertise in streaming sport. — AFP