OTT is the future of sports broadcasting
JUDGING by the reaction we’ve seen, it hasn’t been a hugely popular decision by the Kerry county board to opt to stream (for a fee) the County Final between East and Mid Kerry this Saturday evening instead of selling the rights to broadcast the game to RTÉ.
We can understand why it’s not. In this year of all years – when the option to attend just isn’t there for the vast majority of people – it would have been nice to have allowed as many people as possible to watch it for free in the comforts of their own home. The thing is, though, as nice as it would have been, nice doesn’t butter too many parsnips and, make no mistake about it, this year has been exceptionally challenging to county boards from a financial point of view.
They need to earn a crust and, having weighed up their options, the officers of the Kerry county board came to the conclusion that this was going to earn them more than whatever RTÉ were willing to pay for the rights, and, really, we don’t begrudge them that. Not even a little bit. This is a crisis and needs must. It’s just curious that out of sheer necessity as a result of the pandemic, county boards (and the League of Ireland too for that matter) find themselves at the vanguard of the next big thing in sports broadcasting – OTT, or over the top transmission.
Increasingly we’re going to see clubs and sporting bodies skip the middle man of a traditional broadcast partner and act as their own broadcaster over the internet. It doesn’t break the pay-per-view model per se, but it does significantly reform it. Instead of paying for a catch-all package where you end up paying for sports you have no intention of ever watching – why am I paying for county cricket when all I want to do is watch Spurs? – you just pay for what you want, when you want it.
Some big players are moving in this direction – F1 already has such a service in certain parts of the world – surmising, much like the Kerry board have done, that they’ll stand to profit more from a direct relationship with the consumer. We’d imagine too it would do much to cut down illegal streaming of games. As the popularity of Spotify grew, the file-sharing of music declined in tandem. People are willing to pay as long as it’s easy and relatively affordable.
Sounds like a win-win, right? Pretty much. The one worry you’d have is that by cutting out traditional broadcasters, the coverage of sports would be greatly sanitised and, maybe it would be, but it’s not like there won’t be independent voices to counteract that. The future of broadcasting is here. Whoever thought the Kerry county board would be the ones to usher it in?