The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Utah TV station to only show team via livestream
A television station in Salt Lake City has struck a first-of-its-kind deal: It is going to livestream a professional sports team’s games without also carrying them over the air.
KSL, an NBC affiliate, is charging into the digital future by securing the local rights to livestream the games of Major League Soccer franchise Real Salt Lake to viewers in the Salt Lake City area. The deal announced Tuesday is the first such agreement between a U.S. local TV station and a pro sports team.
The agreement reflects how viewers — who have increasingly made a habit of watching shows and live sporting events on their digital devices — are changing the way broadcasters are looking at their business. And it could pave the way for other local broadcasters to strike similar deals.
Real Salt Lake already has an over-the-air TV outlet: Its games are shown on Sinclair Broadcasting’s KYMU. But KSL — owned by Bonneville International Corp., which itself is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — pursued the streaming rights separately as it looks for local content to reach audiences who have migrated to digital devices.
Another MLS team, the Los Angeles Football Club, has an exclusive deal with a streaming service, bypassing local TV completely. The team sold the rights for 18 games to Alphabet Inc.’s YouTubeTV, which will make them available to subscribers of the over-the-top streaming service in Southern California.
On a national basis, Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN is launching a subscription streaming service, offering live events not shown on its cable channels. It’s a way to reach — and get revenue from — people who don’t want to pay for cable or satellite TV.
Salt Lake City’s KSL can still draw big TV audiences with sports. In recent years, the station has delivered the highest rating of any NBC affiliate during the network’s Olympics coverage. Nearly 30 percent of the market’s 948,000 TV households watched the opening ceremony of the Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, on Friday — twice the U.S. average.
But like other broadcasters, the station has seen its audience levels fall as streaming and video-on-demand choices multiply. In November, KSL’s 10 p.m. newscast averaged 54,000 viewers, half of what it pulled 10 years earlier, according to Nielsen data.
The streaming trend has motivated the station to reinvest its profits from its stillhealthy TV business to create more local content for digital viewers.
“We’re going where the viewers are going,” KSL general manager Tanya Vea said. “We can fight that trend and lose, or transition with them.”
Young viewers tend to stream more video content than older viewers, and Salt Lake City residents have a median age of 31.1, compared with 37.9 nationally.
KSL has three livestreaming channels. One shows continuous weather forecasts. One simulcasts the station’s local TV newscasts. And the station has put cameras in its all-news radio station.