Disney+ has signed a deal with Gary Neville’s football media brand The Overlap. It’ll host his Stick to Football talk show and a new Manchester United-focused programme co-hosted by Wayne Rooney and YouTuber Mark Goldbridge. This follows the arrival on Netflix of Gary Lineker’s The Rest is Football podcast, which digested World Cup action daily and will return twice a week during the season.
But anyone watching these shows won’t see a single Premier League goal. The domestic rights to broadcast live matches and highlights remain with Sky, TNT and the BBC, who pay a combined £1.67 billion per year. UK broadcasters now stump up double that across all sports, with the genre making up 70% of all television spending.
Once Sky’s big money deals in cricket and Formula 1 are added to its football outlay, it has by far the biggest bill. Yet even our free-to-air channels – BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 – now splash more on sport than any other genre of new, original programming, £700 million between them. Sport’s liveness means it is the last major form of communal viewing in our fragmented media world, and ever more important as the years go by.
So, why would streamers pay for sports programmes with no actual sport in them? Sports events have gradually switched from being exclusive to TV to part of a landscape in which television co-exists with digital platforms. So, streamers have been incorporating more sport into their programming strategies.
Competition for our eyeballs is intense. In the UK last year, the average person spent four and a half hours a day watching video at home. Most of it was on the box: 84% of in-home viewing was through the television set, whether via broadcasters, streamers, or YouTube.
Indeed, YouTube’s biggest content increasingly resembles conventional TV. Disney has long owned American sports media giant ESPN. But in the UK its streaming appeal has been based largely on access to content old and new from familiar global franchises such as Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
