The New Frontier Of Interactive Rights: Part 2 - The Sports Pioneers

The first article in this series explained how content owners are pivoting towards a new way to manage their rights and monetize their content, known as Interactive Rights. This is driven by the new ‘Converged Entertainment Paradigm’ of the Streaming Era, which combines content with gamification and social interaction to attract the modern viewer with a new value exchange. The blend of new technology and detailed business rules that together underpin Interactive Rights is designed to help brands and broadcasters to better monetize content.

Sports are natural pioneers for Interactive Rights to create a next-generation entertainment experience for audiences. They have the special mix of popular live events, big sports personalities, very large audiences, and high-value partnerships with broadcasters, and always with that edge-of-your-seat moment about who will win and lose. This creates the right commercial environment for viewers and brands to engage with each other in a new way, creating new value.

Sports Content Owners As Early Adopters

Sports provide the premium content rights in the Media & Entertainment Industry. Sports bodies like the NFL, NBA, MLB, Premier League Football, LaLiga, Serie A, ATP Tour, Boxing, Formula 1, Indian Premier League (IPL), and even the recent one-off Tyson-Paul fight on Netflix, are consistent reminders of the valuable audiences attracted to sports, and how much the leading Media companies are willing to pay to access them. The latest revenues that the above sports bodies have garnered from the sale of their rights amounts to more than $30bn per year, with the NFL ($10bn per year) and the NBA ($6.7bn per year) leading the way in their rights values.

The Sports industry involves many stakeholders, covering events, merchandisers, betting and more. There are many commercial offshoots from sports, driven by its perennial nature, keen interest from fans, and in-depth coverage by the media.

The latest round of sports rights deals have seen some impressive increases in value, such as the NBA achieving a 258% increase to $6.7bn per year from their previous value of $2.6bn per year. But there are also examples of value reductions, such as French Ligue1 football which saw a 20% reduction in its latest rights sale in 2024 to only €500mn per year, despite France reaching the final of the 2022 World Cup (DAZN paid €400mn and beIN paid €100mn for separate games).

Sports rights owners know that increasing the value of their rights, or even maintaining the value, is no simple task. The pressure is high to maintain value in a world where consumer interests are changing and competition for viewers’ time is intense.

Sports rights also bring some specific complexity that the move to Interactive Rights must address. First, there is the “Live Viewing” nature of sports, which means that monetizing the content is more time-bound and urgent. Second, the tiers of ownership in Sports – from league to athlete – are increasingly complex, with individual athletes, becoming an increasingly important commercial element in the industry, amplified by their ability to be individual content creators. Third, the high value of the audience means the advertising and sponsorship opportunities are of high value to brands that want to be associated with sports, and this demand needs to be managed, monetized, and tracked precisely. And fourth, the sports’ brands need to be protected and safeguarded, in order to attract the biggest audiences and best commercial stakeholders, which requires an intensive focus on compliance to brand policies.

Interactive Rights media technology and business technology are key aspects of how all these requirements will be met.

ATP Tour - One Of The Pioneers

Tennis is a truly global sport. The ATP Tour is the men’s professional tennis tour, which has a live broadcast audience of over 700 million people annually for its 63 tournaments that take place in 31 countries. When including the Grand Slam tennis tournaments of the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open this figure rises to over 1.6 billion.

ATP Media is the broadcast arm of the ATP Tour, a vertically integrated entity that is responsible for producing, distributing, selling and managing the media rights of the ATP Tour to over 70 distribution partners globally. ATP Media super-serves its broadcaster partners with a wide array of content including fully produced global video feeds, individual court feeds, highlights packages, social media content, a deep archive, and a content management system.

Broadcaster partners monetize their rights through subscriptions, advertising, and program sponsorships. In the current market, characterized by the shift to a modern viewer that wants a converged entertainment experience, a creative approach is required to sustain and grow revenues.

Leading rights owners, like ATP Media, know this. Like many traditional sports audiences, the ATP Tour’s TV audience skews towards older populations, partly because tennis is generally part of a potentially costly Pay-TV package. The ATP Tour has a clear objective to attract the modern viewer to watch the sport. Until now, broadcasters have bought the rights to deliver the content on broadcast, OTT, and social media outlets, but they have not had the rights for interactivity, overlays, adaptation of content, merchandising, or betting. In parallel, there is demand from advertisers for more dynamic engagement of audiences rather than only static advertising banners around the stadium or court. Interactive Rights are seen as the way forward and ATP Media has become a pioneer in this space.

The goal for Interactive Rights for the ATP Tour in its first rollout is to get existing tennis viewers watching tennis for longer and more regularly via their in-market broadcast partners. This involves interactive loyalty features on the TV screen and potentially integrated or stand-alone second-screen experiences. The longer-term vision is to fully engage the modern viewer with all the interactivity that they could desire, in a roadmap that applies new features as they are market-tested.

But there are steps of adoption to carefully take. It is not only a matter of changing the viewer experience with interactivity presented on the screen. It is also about how broadcasters and advertisers change their operations to access new advertising and sponsorship inventory on screen, and how they manage the full user experience of the associated brands. Implementation has begun but will take some time.

The Way Forwards

Multiple sports are moving to work with Interactive Rights, which is driving momentum for pioneering Broadcasters to offer new interactive viewing experiences to their subscribers. The opportunity for improved commercial value from Interactive Rights is proving to be attractive enough to convince Broadcasters to do the work required to overcome initial implementation hurdles. The future for sports seems to be on its way towards being a converged entertainment experience, blending sports content, gamification, and social interaction.

“At ATP Media, we see a definite opportunity for Interactive Rights to add value to tennis fans and our broadcast partners around the world,” says Alan Bruno, Head of Business Development at ATP Media. “Therefore, we are committed to working with our broadcast partners to implement interactivity in the way that works well for them and their audiences. Commercial brands have long asked for a new way to engage audiences around the sport of tennis. Together with Play Anywhere, our Interactive Rights, Compliance, and Clearinghouse partner, we are able to offer our brand and broadcast partners the right technology and rule sets for both interactivity management and revenue sharing. This is how we believe tennis and the ATP Tour will continue to drive viewer engagement and business value for years to come.”

The next article will explore the three pillars of Interactive Rights that will uphold the new value that sports content owners are looking for.

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