Q&A: AOL Sport - March 2004  

As part of a new series of questions and answers with companies influencing the UK digital sports space, Sport and Technology interviewed Chris Condron, head of news, sport and broadband content at online interactive services provider AOL UK.

How important is sport to AOL UK (what percentage of your turnover comes from sport)?

"AOL is a subscription service and we do not isolate the percentage of our turnover to any one channel or product. The strength of the AOL offering is the range of content, products and services we give the member, not any one single channel. That said, sport is an incredibly popular area of the AOL service, with recent Comscore data ranking the AOL Sport Channel as the second biggest online sporting destination in the country after the BBC. The key to this success is to provide a reliable and robust service day after day, with all the latest news, information and community elements, and then to really ramp up the coverage for the big events such as the Rugby World Cup."

Do you have a separate sports division and what are your main sports offerings?

"We have a production and editorial team of over 100, working across 24 content channels. The sport production team specifically is made up of six people, supported by a range of producers, developers, and business development and services teams across the company. Our approach is simple. We aim to give a comprehensive, engaging and interactive service to our members on a day-to-day basis, and then pull out all the stops for the big events. The basis of our day-to-day material is supplied by the Press Association and Sporting Life, with additional audio and video material from the BBC.
"A good example of what members can find on AOL Sport is our current subscription offer for AOL Broadband members to almost 90 FA Premier League and Nationwide League football [soccer] club websites. This is the result of agreements with a number of online rights holders including Premium TV and Sky meaning we can offer a 12 month subscription to the premium area of one club website to every AOL Broadband account - at no extra cost. This gives members access to exciting football [soccer] content including video match highlights and player interviews and makes AOL Broadband a great place to keep in touch with all the action from their favourite club.
"Members can also re-live highlights of England's triumphant Rugby World Cup campaign, as part of the major World Cup deal we did last year. During the tournament, AOL Broadband members had access to half-time and full-match highlights, live audio, interviews and delayed full match video from each and every game. Again, we offered this at no extra charge to AOL Broadband members. With 2004 shaping up to be such a huge year for sport, we're looking forward to bringing our members even more action."

How successful was the Rugby World Cup service you offered?

"The Rugby World Cup arrangement was a great success for us. We wanted to give our AOL Broadband members the best and most compelling offering from the major sporting event of 2003. I don't think anyone could question that we did that, with AOL Broadband members able to follow every game, and still able to relive Jonny Wilkinson's historic, cup-winning drop goal. We were also able to highlight the benefits of upgrading to a broadband connection to AOL members on dial-up access, and demonstrate to them just how good sports content is on broadband. In addition, we targeted rugby fans outside of the AOL membership, to show them the benefits of a broadband connection, and specifically the benefits of signing up to AOL Broadband during the Rugby World Cup. We wanted to get the message out there that this really was one of the first major sporting events that could be enjoyed over the internet. Much of what we do is still about education - letting consumers know what broadband can do for them, and what they can do with broadband."

Is your strategy therefore to use sport to grow traffic to your services in general or to target certain demographics in particular?

"A little of both. It's important to remember that sport is just one of the areas we're delivering to members on AOL and AOL Broadband. In sport specifically, some deals, such as the football [soccer] highlights, are so encompassing that they touch a wide selection of demographics (and geographic areas), whereas some others will certainly be more demographically targeted."

Would you consider forming one-to-one relationships with a sports club or property?

"For football [soccer], we realised that for our offering to have the best value we had to offer as wide a range of clubs as possible. This meant pulling together several deals with rights holders, some of which were with individual clubs. In the US, AOL has done a number of deals with sporting bodies such as NFL and NASCAR and this type of deal would certainly be interesting to us if we could acquire the right blend of content and marketing rights, while providing effective distribution for the potential partner.

How do you see your sports offerings evolving?

"AOL members have responded very positively to our recent sports partnerships and we're going to continue to offer a strong, all-round service that covers all the bases for high-frequency users, and then adding the really great content and services for the big events. We will continue to develop the sports offering on AOL Broadband during 2004, and we'll be looking to increase the integration of content and products. In the medium term, it's not going to be just about consumers 'watching' content, but how they interact with it and each other."

What sorts of sports content do you think fans are most willing to pay for?

"The market is still very young, and changing very quickly as broadband becomes increasingly mainstream in the UK. We are seeing that content can have value, which is why we chose to bundle the Rugby World Cup access and football [soccer] highlights with AOL Broadband. Sports content is a very strong component of a rounded package, but not, I think, strong enough on its own that fans will pay for it in large numbers."

Do you have any views on which payment models work best for sports content on broadband services - e.g. pay-per-view versus monthly/annual subscriptions?

"I think it's horses for courses. These offerings are still very new, and the rights holders, providers and consumers are still all working towards the best models. I think that we're likely to see a range of different models for some time yet. For example the 'e-season ticket' works well for football [soccer] clubs, as fans are very club-specific in their allegiances. Big events play a major part in any sports offerings, and 2004 is going to be an exciting year with events including the Olympics, Euro2004, and the Ryder Cup on top of all the annual favourites. Recently we've seen rights holders attempt to exploit their rights to big events by charging a set amount for access to a particular tournament. This also works well for service providers, as rights holders need to develop effective distribution strategies if they're going to recoup their investment. Major providers (such as AOL) can provide access to large member bases to the benefit of the rights holder, the service provider and the consumer."

In your personal opinion, which technology do you think will have the greatest impact on sport within the UK over the next few years?

"Within the playing of sport I think we're going to see an increasing amount of technological help for referees, especially in football [soccer]. Rugby league and cricket have led the way, and I think that once the technology is available it's only a matter of time until it will get widely used. In terms of how we consume sport, I think the advent of broadband is going to have a significant effect. As broadband becomes a genuinely mass medium, we're going to see a whole range of new ways to provide consumers with the sporting content they love. Broadband is changing the way we see, consume, use and interact with content and with each other."

The next Q&A will feature Vodafone UK

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