It will be the organisers and owners of key sporting events who decide how sport is broadcast on UK television in the coming years, according to key figures in the media industry. As multi-channel and pay-per-view (PPV) television continue to grow, the options for sports broadcasting rights owners to sell their events are increasing, as are the sums which broadcasting groups are willing to pay for key sports like Premiership football.
Currently, certain sports are marked by the Government as required to be shown on free-to-air (FTA) television, such as the BBC and ITV. However, there are other sports which do not have this Government ‘protection’ and may be sold by the organisers to whichever broadcasting group makes the most attractive bid. It is this situation, Marketing‘s editor Conor Dignam told the Media Question Time audience last week, that may lead to pressure on the Government to completely delist all sports:
“The rights owners ‘own’ the events themselves and at the end of the day, they’ll decide what the values of those events are and where they’ll be shown. I think it’s the Government that will decide to delist the Crown Jewels of sport, which should be free to air. [But] ultimately they will have to do that because they’ll be under so much pressure from the rights owners, who say ‘you’re actually tieing our hands behind our back and we could make a hell of a lot more money if we could put these out in the commercial market’,” argued Dignam.
In this situation, FTA sport may well become a thing of the past, said Dignam. However, Phil Riley, chief executive of Chrysalis Radio, pointed to the current situation in the US, where pay-TV sport has developed alongside a healthy coverage of sports via FTA broadcasting.
“I think we’re being unduly pessimistic about free-to-air sport. If you look at America where clearly pay television has [developed] a much greater strength over time, there is still plenty of free-to-air sport. [This is] because the sports bodies themselves have become better at packaging their content and running Friday night on one channel, Sunday afternoon on another and Monday evening on a third channel.
“I think that the Premier League teams over time will realise that they can extract even more money by having some rights free-to-air, some rights on premium and some rights for package. I think we’re being unduly pessimistic by thinking that everything’s got to go to Sky; I think they’ll be plenty of sport on ITV, the BBC and Channel 4 for some time to come,” Riley told the panel and audience.
