Feature: Feeding the mobile sports snackers - December 2006

(c) SportAndTechnology

Bruce Renny, group marketing director of ROK Entertainment, spoke at the Westminster eForum Seminar Series on Mobile Sports Rights in September 2006, held at Westminster in London. The transcript of his presentation is reproduced below by kind permission of the Westminster eForum and Renny.

Is there a market for sports on mobile TV? The answer is yes. What we don’t know is when, where and how big the market will be. You see, it isn’t a simple thing to provide sports on mobile phones. To begin with there are a huge variety of technologies available. There’s 2.5G, there’s 3G, there’s DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) and we’ve got DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld) coming soon. Some of these technologies deliver content on demand, some are uni-cast and some are broadcast.
Then there’s ‘place-shifting’ IPTV (Internet Protocol TV), the ability to watch TV sports on your mobile via the internet, in a Wi-Fi zone or in a WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) area. And of course, there’s the impending arrival of 4G. And these are just the technologies we know about. You can be sure there are other technologies being developed around the world as we speak.
Then there is the debate between the relative values of live, full-form content, against edited highlights available on-demand. Which is more valuable? Which is going to be watched more? And then there’s the question of content rights. How do the content owner’s monetise the content that they have on mobile phones?
And then you’ve got the propensity of the rights holders to sign exclusive deals with individual networks in individual countries, thus further segmenting the overall mobile TV market. All these factors lead to the conclusion that there are endless business models out there.

The main content options?

To simplify, however, there are two main content options; there’s live full-form broadcast TV and there’s edited highlights available on demand. We are, however, already seeing a clear viewing pattern for mobile TV. It’s what we call the three x three rule and this is crucial; people watch TV on their mobiles, typically, for three minutes at a time and three times a day.
So, bearing in mind that it’s snacking, a short sharp information burst only, how does content fit that pattern?
I have my doubts about the financial validity of broadcast TV on mobiles, particularly with sports, irrespective of what technology is used.
Accessibility to live sports is easy. It’s on TV, radio and the web – it’s all around us at all times. If you want to keep an eye on Blackburn Rovers you’ll find a way to do so, but you won’t watch the game on your mobile phone for the full 90 minutes. You may have a couple of minutes waiting for the bus where you want a quick information burst.
Far more likely to succeed commercially than broadcast TV to mobile phones is short, near-live information bursts available on-demand. We think people will be prepared to pay a premium for content on their mobiles that they want to watch, when they want to watch it, not when it’s broadcast.

Peppercorn payments

For broadcast TV on mobiles, as is the case in Japan, the consumer is more likely to pay at best a token amount. This, of course, is our view – no one knows for sure how this will play out in the UK.
I also think there is a significant and untapped market in the less mainstream sports. Hockey perhaps, carp fishing, Port Vale versus Stoke on a Wednesday evening in November, where those individual sports or those individual clubs have a passionate fan base but those sports are not often broadcast.
As a potentially successful commercial model for sports on mobile phones, I think edited highlights, packaged as near to live as possible would be commercially viable. For example, the availability for a subscription fee of £5-£10 a month through which the subscriber got a news channel, an entertainment channel and a selection of on-demand sports highlights could well work.

Questions from the audience:

Q: “I was perhaps looking at what is the internal dynamics within your companies as businesses. We are essentially content companies, you broker stuff, you product stuff and then you pass it onto the likes of Movio or Vodafone or whoever. As somebody coming in from the outside from a telco, how does it actually work? How do you actually work with your content acquisition teams? How do you actually work out the strategy because therein lies the conundrum of how to actually approach the federations and try and broker a solution, to actually get something across multiple platforms?”

Renny answered: “We aggregate content from all sources and then market that out to our own customers and also our white-labelled versions of 2.5G television. It’s a complex issue because of rights more than anything else. For example, I could get Fox News everywhere in the world except America.
And I can get BBC World everywhere in the world except the UK. There is no such thing as a global play for branded news and certainly for premium sports.”

Q: “I have a question on the concept of snacking and users wanting full simulcast television not just short-formed snacks. There seems to be a slight dichotomy of view here – I’d be very interested in the response.”

Renny answered: “It isn’t just a question of whether people will watch for three minutes or half an hour on the two-inch screen, it’s a question how much they’ll be prepared to pay for that content. And we just absolutely are convinced that for broadcast TV, at best, people will pay a token amount. But for on-demand content we know people are prepared to pay a much higher price. So it isn’t just how long they’re going to watch, it’s what they’ll pay to watch.”

Q: “I wanted to know whether or not anybody had responded to recent research regarding the fact that women are viewing and generally more interested in sport at the moment? And also they would be viewed more as a snacker and that would help in the expansion of the audience if content was delivered to them in a more direct fashion and also marketed to them.”

Renny answered: “I’m really interested in the idea of global audience for mobile TV of all sorts, not just sports. We’ve seen far too much of the provision of male-oriented content, because the assumption is that blokes like gadgets. But it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course that if you don’t put out content that appeals to women, women won’t pay to watch it. And bear in mind this whole industry is really experimental right now, particularly when it comes to content, that the creation of universally-liked content is one thing, but the creation of specific content, aimed at specific groups, is equally important. So yes, women are more interested in sports now than ever before and we have the opportunity to increase that appeal further through mobile TV. But we don’t create the content, we don’t create the sports, we can only package it as best we can and throw it out there.”

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