Facebook’s sports broadcast rights budget is not unlimited. The company’s strategy is still experimental. Building communities, fostering connectivity, and offering optionality are the driving forces behind the foray into live sports.
These were the key takeaways from SportTechie’s recent conversation with Peter Hutton, Facebook’s director of global live sports partnerships and programming.
“It isn’t really a time of clear answers,” Hutton said. “It’s clearly a period where sports consumption is changing, and we’re a big part of that consumption change. But we need to learn where we’re going to end up in this route. Sport is a natural fit with Facebook, it’s just ‘How do we fit? Where do we invest? Where do we look and prioritize?’ That philosophy will shape over time.”
Facebook’s boldest sports-related venture in the U.S. to date was picking up the exclusive carriage of 25 weekday matinee MLB games and one non-exclusive game for a reported $30 million. Hutton said that the average viewer of those games was 20 years younger than on traditional broadcasts and that MLB executives were “really happy” with the audience.
Sporting News wrote on Monday that the 26 games received 123 million views in total, as defined by video plays at least three seconds long. That is 4.73 million views per game, on average with a single-game high of 7.1 million. The first broadcast peaked with concurrent viewership of about 85,000. Over the course of that deal, Facebook made dozens of alterations to its feed, which was produced by MLB Network, such as changing the size of its graphic for the score in the middle of a game.
“This may sound obvious, but in linear TV, you send out one feed and you see people’s reactions to that feed,” Hutton said. “The beauty of Facebook is that you can try things. You can test market things that work with different people to provide different sorts of experiences and then analyze that data in real-time.”
Facebook’s two biggest international bids have been in India—a reported $600 million losing bid for Indian Premier League cricket and a successful effort to land the entire 380-match schedule of Spanish La Liga soccer. Those showed a willingness to be the primary carrier rather than simply a weekly companion, as with MLB and the old MLS deal. Facebook has more users in India than any other country, according to the Guardian, with more than 241 million accounts in India compared to 240 million in the U.S. Though Facebook acquired exclusive rights to stream all the La Liga soccer matches, Hutton said the company sold nonexclusive rights to Sony for some local broadcasts because he “felt it was important to give them another option.” He added that bandwidth in certain areas of the country wasn’t strong enough to support live streaming.
Hutton arrived at the social media giant back in March with extensive international experience in linear sports broadcast networks. Most recently, he spent three years as CEO of Eurosport, the Discovery-owned premium sports channel. As Hutton quipped on his LinkedIn page, he was an “Englishman, working for Americans, living in France, thanks to years in Asia.” Indeed, much of his experience stemmed from prior work in Dubai and in India where, in his own words, he logged a “year of transforming ESPN-Star into Fox Sports, only for it all to be sold back to ESPN/Disney five years later.”
“This is clearly a learning process, and it’s very important not to be what I used to be,” Hutton said. “As a TV director, I would say here’s my view of the game. I am shooting with 20 cameras, and I’ll choose between those 20 cameras and this is the story that you’re going to receive of the game. But actually opening up the realms to people to create their own story.”
There are a variety of ways to create personalization. Hosting multiple streams of the same game is one option, with fans getting to choose camera angles or to track star players. Hutton, however, said those choices weren’t always popular when offered on pay TV with its use becoming “more a marketing tool than an actual consumption tool.” Amazon is presenting viewers with multiple audio feeds for its NFL Thursday Night Football broadcasts, and that may resonate better. Facebook Watch has partnered with the NFL on game recaps, and 18.5 million viewed at least a one-minute recap during the season’s first three weeks.
More importantly for Facebook, Hutton said, is to think cross-platform. That means encompassing all of Facebook’s properties—primarily Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Oculus—to provide more options.
“Hopefully we can feed in tools that serve a sports fan’s instinct and then allow them to create what they want out of those tools, which is a very different attitude than my previous world, really,” Hutton said, before later adding: “There’s clearly an instinct in that younger generation to make things out of sports footage and have more levels of data or different ways of engagement.”
Facebook’s earliest sports experiment were heavily U.S.-centric, although that was primarily a product of Facebook Watch becoming available in this country first. The U.S. remains a major sports country so that will be a focus, but Hutton said there are no hard-and-fast rules governing decisions other than “whatever makes sense.” In the past year, Facebook has snared the entire slate of English Premier League matches for the Southeast Asian market as well as both UEFA Champions League and Copa Libertadores matches in Brazil and Latin America. Through the first two months (August and September), those Champions League broadcasts attracted more than five million unique one-minute views.
Most of the fees paid for these rights have not been disclosed or leaked, but Facebook is said to have spent £200 million ($265 million) on the Premier League package. The social media giant has also dabbled in smaller niche sports such as CrossFit and IronMan that don’t fit easily into a standard TV schedule. Those events often take too much time and have too disparate an audience, but they also are both about inspiring others to participate and Facebook excels at cultivating engagement. Facebook can help sports properties and channels funnel viewers to other platforms and services, Hutton said, noting that its broadcasts must appeal to both the converted and the new fan.
Facebook is still navigating the sports rights landscape, determining the next best investment from what is available. And while the company has significant financial wherewithal, the dollar figure at Hutton’s disposal is finite.
Asked directly how big his budget is, Hutton replied, “The best answer to that is, look at what we’ve done. Clearly, it’s not massive, but it’s sizable experiments in a few key markets.”