“If no one is watching, what’s the point to having the rights?”
That statement underscores an overarching problem faced by college sports entities (just about all sports, frankly) and its streaming rights.
Wayne Sieve, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of EverSport, made that remark to SportTechie, in light of the current state of these media properties. While there are various options available for users, they primarily focus on serving as a tech solution, concurrently, paving the way for EverSport to enter this space.
For college football fans this season, a well-packaged collective service, as offered by the major pro sports leagues, still doesn’t exist. The main legalized ways to stream NCAA games include WatchESPN, CBS College Sports Live, Sling TV, or a pay-TV subscription of the college football networks with their cable provider. That’s it. Otherwise, pirated streams remain as an alternative, outnumbering the legalized services.
The aforementioned first of which is well-known by users that they have to be a paying subscriber of ESPN for access, but it covers the college football games broadcasted on its family of networks. CBS’ offering doesn’t require a cable or satellite subscription like ESPN’s; rather, it’s a $10 per month fee that spans all the games CBS televises, including press conferences and other news segments. Sling TV’s $20-a-month product only includes ESPN and ESPN2, with an add-on sports package of ESPNews, ESPNU, and the SEC Network for $5 more. And, again, the individual college sports networks necessitate payment via their respective cable or satellite providers.
Thus, not a whole lot has drastically evolved in the past decade. There’s an omission among the services out there to provide a comprehensive approach that goes beyond the tech solution. Rights holders are at a juncture where the technological angle alone doesn’t suffice; rather, they also want to see audiences engaging with their content–especially for streaming games to become more robust and viable as a whole.
From EverSport’s standpoint, all rights holders want the same result: success in what they’re doing.
“The technology part of the solution has largely become commoditized, so it’s no longer about providing a solution for making broadcasts available online. It’s about fulfilling the needs of content owners and audiences alike,” says Sieve.
Twitch–not surprisingly, considering eSports’ rapid evolution–presents a blueprint for this ecosystem shift. They never sought out to be a one-size-fits-all platform; if it were so, it’d likely be a disservice to users, gaming publishers, and advertisers. Instead, the specifically catered to the needs of gaming content owners and fans, which led to them becoming a go-to medium for that vertical. EverSport plans to do the same for all sports, where they propel viewership and monetization in concert for rights holders’ success in the streaming arena.
“Open platforms with their one-size-fits-all approach simply do not address the needs of content owners in sports, because they don’t address the nuances of how sports content is distributed or how fans consume content,” Sieve states, with respects to why existing services can’t accommodate ongoing issues.
Therefore, EverSport built its business around providing partners with a great, in-class technical solution as well as giving them the tools to engage with their fans. EverSport’s platform is strategically designed to fit sport rights holders’ needs. Of note, they don’t ask for an initial fee due to the fact that these international markets haven’t established themselves as solid user bases. Instead, EverSport and partners arranged for a shared portion of subscription and advertising revenue streams.
As The Los Angeles Times reported, EverSport’s business model entails dynamic pricing, too, where subscriptions range from monthly to annual rates that’s packaged around certain teams, leagues, or sports–even being able to buy a single game. Location-based technology will help partners and advertisers target users abroad as well as variable pricing for those subscription plans. Such feature enables better segmentation, which opens up focused marketing possibilities.
College sports, coincidently, happened to be the first case study for EverSport, when they debuted as a startup just over two years ago.
Their premise staying consistent to this day: strategically aggregate as many games as possible into its platform as well as offering several subscription plans across the globe that’s now customizable for 4,000 events.
EverSport has had ongoing dialogue with the Pac-12 around doing a partnership together, with this collegiate season marking its official launch after agreeing upon terms earlier this year. EverSport’s Big Ten deal came to fruition more recently, when they realized the prudent value of working together–particularly given the former’s strong position to deliver distribution of live college sports games around the world.
Besides providing these conferences top-notch streaming technology, EverSport offers tools to track and analyze performance and a sophisticated marketing effort to help drive discovery and viewership against the video streams. Each of the conferences makes their games available via EverSport.tv as well as on their own respective websites. EverSport claims that no other partner is bringing an equally comprehensive package to the table for these sports rights holders to thrive in the streaming space.
Between military, students abroad, business travelers, and vacationers, there are millions of college sports fans all over the world, with most of them not having a reliable means for accessing the live games from these conferences. Even connecting with a small percentage of these fans presents a key priority, coupled with a compelling business opportunity for these conferences and schools.
“These conferences are looking for EverSport to play a significant role in driving discovery and engagement with their content. Frankly, our objective is pretty simple: to drive awareness of this content to fans that are already predisposed to watching it,” says Sieve, while leveraging traditional promotional vehicles, social media, search, and syndication to gain adoption.
Conversely, these two conferences have been proactive to showcase its games internationally via streaming prior to their commitment with EverSport.
The Pac-12 Network, just a year ago, made a splash by starting to simulcast its games through a YouTube paywall, with the idea to assist their ever-growing international alumni base and help their respective efforts to recruit prospective students.
The Big Ten Network, meanwhile, has supplied a subscription video service to those interested abroad for five years now. Michael Calderon, the Big Ten Network’s Vice President of Programming and Digital Media, telling the L.A. Times that it’s at a “stable growth point.”
EverSport, however, has entered the college sports streaming space with a counter, potentially fruitful move to expedite international consumption: package the Pac-12, Big Ten, Big Sky, and other conferences as an annual college pass for $170, which broadens the appeal to purchase and somewhat deters further fragmentation for a shared landscape.
As for YouTube’s positioning to grow this vertical, it remains to be seen whether they will expand outside of their Pac-12 partnership–unforeseen impediments may develop, despite Google’s resources to acquire sports rights.
Sieve explains: “The major difference between EverSport and YouTube is YouTube has a one-size-fits-all solution, whereas EverSport was specifically built for sports content owners and sports fans. Many of the tools that sports content owners need are not available on YouTube, and we’ve spent considerable efforts developing sports-centric solutions.”
He added: “I’ve also heard other content owners say YouTube struggles with driving awareness of live content, which isn’t all that surprising, considering the differences in driving awareness of live content versus VOD.”
Moreover, YouTube and EverSport have diametrically opposed positions when it comes managing the livestreaming infrastructure for major sporting events.
YouTube’s Head of Product for Consumers, Manuel Bronstein, acknowledged to Wired that live video, overall, is hard. Their initial beta test took place with NBC Sports during the 2012 London Olympics. The livestreaming nascent stage and magnitude of this event tested its infrastructure, which consists of a system that captures streams twice, switching between them in case one of them goes offline. They’ve also had to improve latency issues. Now, YouTube is capable of streaming 1080p video game content at 60 frames per second. The providers of tentpole sporting events want an unquestionably solid livestream that doesn’t have any mishaps, and little overhead–on top of integrated ways to monetize.
EverSport, on the other hand, believes managing huge sporting events is actually easier than smaller event. That’s based on larger events usually possessing more infrastructure in place to make streaming easier.
“The smaller the event, the less infrastructure is built out; and the more creative you have to get to create the same level of perfection as the bigger events. For large events, ensuring audience scalability is the main challenge, but that isn’t hard to manage,” says Sieve.
Nevertheless, with regards to EverSport’s college football partnerships, this isn’t the first time that either the Pac-12 and Big Ten put their games online behind a paywall, pursuing revenue growth in untapped markets.
The macro-level problem among college sports rights holders remains prevalent: how many fans there are, or can be, around the world.