The Fight for Sporting Rights

14 December 2017 The Fight for Sporting Rights Share

Throughout our 19 years of experience, Paywizard have worked with many sporting clients - such as BT Sports, Boxnation, Racing UK and many more - making us experts in the industry. Through our subscription billing and CRM platform as well as our support services, we've helped clients grow customer loyalty whilst increasing acquisition by up to 25%, growing ARPU up to 30% and reducing churn by up to 60%. The sports industry when it comes to pay-TV has been growing for years and with eSports growing, the rise of OTT and more organisations wanting a piece of the PPV pie, it's bigger than ever.

The Rise of OTT Sports Rights The shift from the traditional viewing of sports to OTT has been happening for years, but now it's becoming a whole new ball game - especially for Tennis. This year, avid tennis fans in the UK will have to sign up to Amazon Prime, Euro Sports and BT Sports to watch all tennis leagues and competitions.

Back in August, Amazon outbid Sky to win exclusive ATP tour tennis rights. This is Amazon's first major live TV sports rights deal outside the US and potentially signals that an already competitive market could be about to heat up further, pitting digital players against traditional TV broadcasters.

This follows Amazon's agreement with the National Football League to stream 10 Thursday-night American football games in the US this season, alongside broadcasters NBC and CBS. Amazon also has the rights to live audio-streaming for Bundesliga football commentaries in Germany, available through its Amazon Music service.

For consumers, depending which sports everyone is interested in, this could mean a rise in their TV spend as they may now have to sign up to OTT services purely for the purpose to watch sports. This could also mean cord-cutting in other places to even out costs.

Among service providers, competition is only growing. fuboTV, a sports-first live streaming TV service in the US, recently passed the 100,000 subscriber milestone. Originally launching in January 2015 as a streaming soccer destination, fuboTV has - in less than a year - built a new over-the-top (OTT) live service that offers 65-plus channels, providing fans with the most sports for the least money, and keeping traditional broadcasters and other digital streaming services on their toes.

The Transition from FTA to PPV These days, we are seeing a lot more Free-to-air broadcasters jumping into Pay Per View as a way to increase revenue. This is a trend we've seen with our own clients, such as our recently announced win with ITV Box Office. ITV Box Office has secured the rights for the World Boxing Super Series and is using Paywizard and Ostmodern's PPV Solution, Venue, to help support loyal, long-term and repeat subscriber relationships.

Venue enables broadcasters to combine the content journey and customer into one single view to create a deeper and longer lasting relationship with their customers. A PPV event is complex, so it's vital that operators ensure they're able to handle both the volumes of traffic as well efficiently supporting customers.

The past few years have brought notable change in how media organisations make money from video. Triggered in part by the rapid growth of OTT services, viewers today are comfortable with a variety of pay models to match the different ways they're viewing content-from subscriptions to pay-per-view models. It's a development that hasn't escaped the notice of traditional, free-to-air broadcasters looking to diversify the ways they monetise their content and reduce their dependency on advertising-based revenues.

The sports broadcasting industry is undergoing rapid change. Those that master the customer experience, paying close attention to subscriber management and retention will likely win the day.

As a premium service, BoxNation's customer experience at the critical registration and subscription stage must be second to none. We chose Paywizard as our payment partner because the Paywizard payment mechanism is smooth, fast and secure and because it gives us the flexibility and scalability that we need, said Simon Green, CEO of Boxnation.

To find out how the sports experts at Paywizard can help you, get in touch today.

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