Can upstart network score big?
It’s a minnow for the moment, but beIN Sports could be poised to upset the status quo
One of the signature dates in European soccer passed on the weekend, the second leg of El Clasico between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid, the two behemoths of Spain’s top league.
It was typically dazzling, with Madrid scoring late to tie and then Lionel Messi, sporting a beard worthy of the NHL spring, drilling a shot in stoppage time that gave Barcelona a 3-2 win and a crucial three points in their campaign for the championship of La Liga.
The global audience was an estimated 650 million. The audience in Canada would have been a wee tiny fraction of that.
While almost every major sporting event in the world has sold its Canadian broadcast rights to one of the twin towers of domestic sports television, Bell and Rogers, the only way to see La Liga on TV in this country is on beIN Sports, a premium cable channel that’s not even available in about a third of Canadian households.
While the Bell-Rogers duopoly has a stranglehold on the Canadian market, beIN is something of an upstart. Although it’s been available in Canada for about five years, it’s been unable to navigate its way into the tiers of sports channels to which many households subscribe, in part because Bell and Rogers also happen to be cable distributors in large parts of the country. And in a world where sports television, once an unparalleled cash cow, has seen declining subscription rates and fewer customers willing to pay for cable, beIN Sports is going the other direction: they’re offering a product that requires a subscription fee in the hopes that customers who want to see their sports will pony up about $15 a month.
“What we’ve seen is that live sports drives tune-in,” says Ron Meyeringh, beIN Sports’ vice-president of business development. “And what we specialize in is top-tier sports.”
But while beIN Sports is a minnow in Canadian waters, it’s something else entirely on a global stage. Owned by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, it has 80 channels in 40 countries, and is the largest sports broadcaster in the world by some metrics.
It makes for a strange dichotomy: an international giant rendered a tiny outsider in Canada because TSN and Sportsnet already take up all of the room.
It also makes for an interesting question: could the tiny minnow eventually become a threat?
Currently, it’s fair to say that beIN Sports is a boutique offering here. In addition to La Liga, it holds the Canadian rights for the top-tier Italian and French leagues, Serie A and Ligue 1, plus parts of the UEFA Champions League and Europa League — TSN also has rights for some of those two competitions — and other sports, from U.S. college football to motorcycle racing.
While even a decade ago this lineup wouldn’t entice many Canadians, Meyeringh says there has been “tremendous uplift” in the interest in the top European leagues in North America, thanks in part to the presence of global stars like Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, his rival at Madrid.
Jeremy St. Louis, a beIN Sports host (and a Canadian) says those European leagues continue to be a source of delight for domestic viewers.
TSN and Sportsnet are in the vast majority of Canadian households with a television subscription, although that may change in the coming years now that the CRTC forced them to be offered à la carte. BeIN Sports hasn’t released subscriber numbers, but an educated guess is that it has a much smaller foothold, something like one in 10 or one in 20 households that pays for TV (it’s also available as a streaming-only subscription in Canada called beIN Sports Connect).
Meyeringh says they’ll continue to try to get into the sports cable tiers, and he hopes it can grow to TSN-Sportsnet levels. In the U.S., the channel went from zero to 45 million subscribers in five years.
Hopes for that kind of growth in Canada sound like bold optimism, but the sports broadcasting landscape will eventually approach some kind of reckoning. Bell and Rogers pay vast sums for television rights, but it remains to be seen if they will do so again when the current deals expire. In that environment, a relatively small channel backed by immense oil wealth could, in theory, upset a lot of traditional arrangements.
Unlikely? Probably. But hey, Leicester City won the Premier League last season.