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 The mobile sports rights market is in a state of flux, writes Sportcal’s editorial director, Callum Murray, with all those involved - sports federations and other rights-owners, content aggregators, sports agencies, technical facilitators and mobile operators - trying to predict the future direction of audiovisual sports content via mobile phones.
Many argue that this is an interim or transitional period in the evolution of mobile rights - none more loudly than television broadcasters which arguably stand to gain most from a perceived trend for mobile rights and television rights to be packaged together once again, as technologies converge.
In fact, the practice of selling mobile rights separately from television rights occurs mainly at present among top sports properties such as leading soccer leagues and competitions with the market power to dictate how their rights are sold.
Paul Bristow, managing director of Deltatre Media, the Italy-based information and media technology company, said: “The decision on whether to sell mobile rights separately from TV is a strategic choice for rights owners. If you have a must-have product, you can hold back the mobile rights and have a separate tender. If you’re a smaller sport looking to get TV coverage, you might have to throw in mobile and broadband. It’s a question of the strength of your product.” Salami-slicing Some in the mobile industry are questioning how thinly top rights-holders can continue to ‘salami-slice’ their rights. There is also dispute over the kind of mobile phone sports content for which rights are required. Steve Wallage, sports rights manager at Orange UK, said: “I can’t give you a decent answer to that question. It’s a very complex and confusing area. Where do you draw the line on what you can and can’t do?” Orange recently had to change the name of a sports product it offers because English soccer’s Premier League complained that it undermined the value of rights the league has sold to Orange’s competitors Vodafone and 3.
Peter Kentie, the manager of marketing and media at the top Dutch soccer club PSV Eindhoven said: “You can hardly prevent an operator from creating mobile content by sending journalists or even students to a game, making footage and broadcasting that content on a mobile service. So many fans have created their own content site with moving images, generated by themselves with their own mobile camera phone or even better equipment. It’s a tough job to monitor all content that will be broadcast online and therefore will end up on mobile devices.” Defining the mobile rights market The European Commission is set to play an important role in the shaping of the mobile sports rights market in future, following the publication in September 2005 of a ‘sector inquiry’ into the provision of sports content over third generation mobile networks. Among the competition concerns identified in the report, the commission includes: ‘cross-platform bundling resulting in warehousing of rights by operators in neighbouring markets, in particular TV operators.’
John Enser, a media lawyer at UK law firm Olswang, who acts for several broadcasters that are active in the mobile rights market, said that the difference between the television and mobile rights markets is that, “Everyone understands the TV rights market, it’s a clearly understood process. The mobile rights market is very fragmented. One of the big issues is bundling. It’s a big problem and there’s no consistency about who is getting the rights from where and when. Sometimes they come directly from the organising body. For example, UEFA’s deals with mobile operators. Sometimes individual broadcasters are selling rights on their own account or acting as middlemen. One of the difficulties is that the rights paths are not clear. There’s no clarity on whether there is a separate mobile rights window and what it looks like.”
For competition law purposes, the commission has concluded that mobile sports services form a different market from television sports services, arguing that they are ‘consumed in a very different manner, for technical, as well as for social reasons.’
However, the sector inquiry stopped short of laying down any generally applicable rules in the sale of mobile rights, warning instead that the commission will act on a case-by-case basis where it believes that competition principles are being flouted. Broadcasters and mobile television  There are those that argue that separate mobile rights should not be required for broadcasters that are delivering an entire channel over mobile phones. According to this argument, the broadcasters, which are generally using the IPTV standard to deliver the channel, are simply broadcasting to a tiny receiver in the same way that they already do to standard TV sets: if they have already acquired the rights to broadcast to big TV sets, why should they have to pay again to broadcast to small ones?
As British Sky Broadcasting’s Stephen Nuttall put it: “If it’s just a channel, and it’s not altered, it’s just telly.”
It is understood that the argument was tested by an operator that was delivering a channel that included UEFA Champions League coverage, and claimed that it should not have to acquire separate mobile rights. UEFA, unsurprisingly, did not buy the argument, and it is thought that the operator eventually backed down.
Any legal dispute over whether a broadcaster has the rights to deliver sports coverage to mobile phones will eventually turn on the terms of its contract with the rights-owner, according to Enser. He said that there is a ‘major row’ going on between some broadcasters and rights-owners over whether the broadcasters have acquired mobile rights along with television rights, adding: “Some sports channels that are looking to go on mobile are going through their rights deals. Some are sufficiently ambiguous that they can say they have the rights. This is usually the case with lower-key sports. In others, mobile rights are specifically reserved.”
Separating mobile rights from broadband rights can also be problematic. As BSkyB’s Nuttall said: “Mobile is really just a form of the internet. It’s difficult to distinguish between broadband internet and mobile rights.”
Broadcasters and mobile operators have already taken tentative steps towards providing live coverage of sports events in full on mobile phones.
For example: T-Mobile in Germany has agreed a deal to offer live streaming of 20 selected soccer World Cup matches this summer, with the option to transmit the matches over telecommunications networks, such as GPRS or UMTS, on a pay basis.
The deal with T-Mobile was the second to involve live World Cup coverage after an agreement announced earlier with Switzerland’s Swisscom.
Last year, 3 offered live coverage of motor cycling’s MotoGP series to its subscribers in Italy; while Italian soccer’s Internazionale is providing live coverage of its home matches to subscribers of 3; and Vodafone agreed a deal with BSkyB to create a special mobile channel to carry live coverage of the England cricket team’s test series against Pakistan in the autumn of 2005.
However, BSkyB’s Nuttall admitted that the broadcaster is still wary over its approach to providing live audiovisual content over mobile phones, saying: “We’re trying to work out what people want from the mobile market. It’s not immediately obvious that there is a demand to watch live sports events on a mobile phone.”
PSV Eindhoven’s Kentie said: ‘The big question is: will people enjoy a full live game on a mobile phone or device? Reality tells us that the device is not suited because of battery power. We once did a test with PDAs, offering a live broadcast of a complete game on HP iPAQ mobile devices, and we learned that the device was not able to show the full length of the game because video is very battery-intensive.” Consumer payment models From the consumer’s point of view, payment options range from on-demand and pay-per-view to subscription models. For example, Dorna, the sports agency that distributes rights for motor cycling’s MotoGP series, said that content is delivered to the consumer on either a pay-per-view or monthly subscription basis, depending on the mobile operator’s policy. It said that the price of the content changes on the Monday after the race weekend, enabling the consumer to download the content at a cheaper price.
In a survey published in November 2005, Olswang asked respondents how they wanted to pay for audiovisual content, both online and via mobile phones. It found that the largest group of respondents, 37%, said that they would not pay, with 24% opting for a mixture of pay-per-view and ‘pay to keep,’ 13% for a more expensive payment download, 10% for a fixed monthly payment (for content that cannot be kept) and just 5% for pay-per-view.
The report concluded: “Olswang’s survey suggests that consumers are not loyal to any particular category of service provider when it comes to buying content on new platforms. When asked who they would prefer to purchase audiovisual downloads from, the most popular response from respondents was that they didn’t mind as long as the service was good. This suggests that there is a massive opportunity for service providers who can create and successfully market compelling content services on new platforms.” This article is a shortened version of the introduction to Mobile Sports Rights in Europe 2006, a recently-published, 96-page report from Sportcal.com, the business site for sport. The report, which costs £595, contains detailed information on who has acquired which rights in the 15 top Western European markets, breaking deals down by country, sport and operator. It also contains detailed case studies, the conclusions of the European Commission’s ‘sector inquiry’ into 3G mobile sports content, an overview of the mobile market and details of over 100 key industry and sports contacts. For more information or to buy a copy of the report, visit http://www.sportcal.com/commerce/, telephone +44 (0) 20 8944 8786 or e-mail: marketing@sportcal.com.
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