In part two of our Sports Insider feature on the Great Sports Streaming War, the viewing numbers for the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight signal the arrival of Netflix as a major player; YouTube’s unusual sports strategy – and is TikTok the dark horse?
OPINION
The numbers don’t lie and even if Mike Tyson and Jake Paul threw fewer punches than two drunken sailors in their farcical boxing exhibition, Netflix handed a black eye to its sports streaming rivals last weekend.
While the allegedly manufactured bout between a 27-year-old YouTuber and a 58-year-old man with a heart condition turned out to be exactly what we all expected, most of us still watched it.
But it’s likely that Netflix executives won’t care about the quality (or lack thereof) of the pugilism.
All that was ringing in their ears was the size of the audience (an impressive 65 million concurrent streams at peak), that the servers held up under the enormous demand (only just ... at one stage they were creaking more than Tyson) and that every ad was sold.
Its success told senior executives at the world’s biggest movie and TV subscription service – and its Big Tech rivals like Amazon and Apple – that Netflix can be a major player in live sport.
And now the gloves are off.
Of the five established tech players circling live sports rights – Apple, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok and Netflix – until now it has been the latter that has been perceived to be dragging the chain.
Last week in part one of our Sports Insider special feature, we looked at Apple and Amazon, arguably the market leaders in sports streaming, albeit with opposing strategies.
But it’s Johnny-come-lately Netflix who is making the biggest moves.
For close to a decade, the subscription platform scoffed at the idea of buying sports rights.
While its phenomenally successful Drive to Survive Formula One series and Michael Jordan’s brilliant The Last Dance cemented its reputation as the master of the fast-emerging fly-on-the-wall doco genre, Netflix seemed indifferent to live sport.
Instead, it baffled us with weird and offbeat plays like its “Netflix Cup” golf tournament, a “crossover” event featuring F1 drivers and professional golfers, including Lando Norris and Rickie Fowler, and dropped it after only one year.
In hindsight, we can now see that Netflix was slowly but surely building livestreaming capability while also testing its audience’s appetite for personality-driven live sports.
And in May this year, the world’s biggest subscription-based streaming service suddenly shifted gears and jumped all-in to live sport with the first of three big plays – a live comedy roast of retiring NFL superstar Tom Brady.
While the three-hour Brady show was cringeful and as painful to watch as Tyson-Paul, it’s likely that the Netflix bosses were only interested in two things ... did people watch and did the servers hold up?
It was “yes” on both counts.
Netflix revealed the The Roast of Tom Brady was the 26th-most-watched show in the platform’s history, drawing more than 22 million viewers in the US alone.
Executives could sense a growing appetite for sport among its subscriber base.
Paul-Tyson was the next test, one made easier by being able to deal directly with the pair rather than a major sports organisation.
Part of the US$60 million ($102m) that the boxers reportedly earned was their participation in a build-up series called Countdown, which drew massive male audiences ahead of the fight.
It was another example of Netflix changing the sports content landscape. Produce a Drive to Survive-style series that then culminates in a major live event.
Crucially, the servers largely stood up to the capacity test last weekend and the blowback over the fight’s poor quality was manageable for Netflix because it did not charge subscribers extra (had it done so, fury levels would have been much higher).
By selling out its entire advertising inventory, Netflix also took a giant step towards entrenching a cheaper (or free) ad-supported tier as an option to its subscription service, a move it needs to make to secure its long-term future.
Netflix can now swing into its third and biggest sports play of this year – two headlining Christmas Day NFL matches – with confidence its streaming infrastructure will cope under intense demand.
The NFL (American National Football League) deal is a more conventional one. Netflix paid US$150m for the two games. At US$75m each, that sounds expensive but the production of an original mid-tier movie costs the streaming service about the same figure. And ad spots for Christmas Day – at US$5m a pop – are already sold out.
Netflix won’t charge a pay-per-view (PPV) fee for the Christmas Day NFL extravaganza and has added further popular appeal for viewers by securing Beyoncé as halftime entertainment in the Houston Texans-Baltimore Ravens game.
In that sense, its approach is similar to Amazon, which is using high profile one-off sports encounters from the Champions League and English Premier League (EPL) football as part of its Prime programming to persuade users to retain their annual sub to the online shopping giant.
Netflix thinks you’re less likely to dump your subscription if you know that next month’s treats include some high profile sport as well as the new season of Bridgerton.
Already, Netflix has an industry-leading churn figure of only 2% and occasional monthly sporting treats will only aid subscriber retention, while offering big audiences for advertisers on any lower-tier offering.
But Netflix’s biggest sports play is still to come.
World Wrestling Entertainment and Dana White’s UFC, both now owned by the same company, are expected to make Netflix infinitely more powerful by doing deals where content from the two combat sport juggernauts features regularly on the platform.
That will raise the stakes substantially in sport’s battle of the streamers.
Once upon a time, YouTube was considered the mortal enemy of sports bodies. Now it is the No 1 destination for online sports content.
Gone are the days when organisations like New Zealand Rugby and broadcasters Sky TV would comb the Google-owned platform for “illegal” content such as game highlights posted by fans.
Now no marketing executive from Barcelona FC to the Blues could hold down their job without an effective strategy for using the video-sharing platform.
How did this happen? And is it a sustainable strategy in the face of the other tech players?
The attitude of rights holders has shifted due to the sheer size and reach of YouTube’s global audience of 2.5 billion active monthly users. Sports teams and leagues (and some broadcasters) now see livestreaming and digital highlights on YouTube as just as vital as linear broadcasts.
There are several reasons why.
Firstly, people are lazy and don’t search for sports content online anymore. Instead, YouTube has become their default destination. Google long ago recognised this and created a dedicated business unit to attract rights-holders and help monetise and protect their content.
For smaller sports and competitions who can’t afford the cost of creating and marketing their own digital channels, this has been a godsend.
It’s cheaper than building your own platform and while Google takes a decent slice of the ad or subscription revenue, the trade-off is a massively increased viewing audience which grows in popularity and, ultimately, other commercial opportunities.
This is the lesson New Zealand Rugby learned the hard way and why it ran up the white flag and made YouTube the primary home of its specialised behind-the-scenes content, when it was originally planned solely for the national union’s new app, NZR+.
YouTube now holds deals with everybody from Sky Sports UK for Premier League content to the International Olympic Committee, UFC, NBA and Formula One, who all run partnership channels.
“Google is the largest search engine in the world and YouTube is the second-largest,” said YouTube’s head of sport, Rob Pilgrim.
“People expect highlights when they come to the site. People come to YouTube to search after major sporting events and there is a 97% chance you will find the moment on YouTube legitimately.
“The days where a highlights video might be posted 24 hours later are gone. Organisations are putting up highlights in minutes, not hours now.”
Increasingly, YouTube is adding subscriber channels driven by individual sporting stars and live coverage itself as a powerful means of seducing viewers into spending even more time on the platform.
Cristiano Ronaldo’s channel has 68 million viewers. Jake Paul’s has about 22 million. The NBA’s channel draws a similar number.
It’s why the organising body of the UK’s women’s professional football league threw out its strategy of creating an exclusive OTT (over-the-top terrestrial) platform to instead screen selected matches live on YouTube.
Those games are regularly drawing an audience that’s five times bigger now.
It’s a strategy markedly different to Apple, Amazon and Netflix but one that continues to strike paydirt and keep Google in the game.
TikTok is the outlier keeping rival tech executives awake at night.
With a billion active monthly users (more than three times YouTube’s audience), the maverick Chinese app attracts one in eight people living on the planet.
And that’s causing the sports world to take notice. There’s now not an athlete of substance or sporting team or league of consequence not on TikTok.
TikTok says 57% of its users watch sports content on the app every week, which is why it’s making an aggressive push into sport, including live broadcasting rights.
With its emphasis on “co-creation”, TikTok believes it’s best placed among the BigTech players to secure younger fans, top athletes and progressive sports bodies.
An ability to partner with individual stars as well as leading teams and brands to showcase their personalities (think the recent Fast5 netball team pre-match dances) is TikTok’s secret sauce.
By also encouraging “creators” to further augment and share that content, it only amplifies the message and reaches more people.
To encourage “user activity”, TikTok spends millions on developing “content tools” making it easy for fans to add special effects, music and graphics to clips.
These sit in its newly-introduced “SportsTok” area within its app.
“SportsTok is powered by the community-driven nature of the platform,” says TikTok’s marketing spiel. “62% of TikTok users watch major sports events to be part of cultural conversations.”
TikTok is trying to eat the lunch of YouTube, which operates in a similar ecosystem but with longer-form clips and premium product often behind a paywall.
Its strategy draws existing sports fans by working with athletes, but also attracts passive viewers, by partnering with sports-adjacent creators and communities, and new viewers attracted by relatable content.
No other tech platform can match this.
It’s why Hyundai used TikTok exclusively to launch its new electric car in collaboration with the NFL, which drew 2.3 billion video views.
TikTok’s latest big sporting experiment launched this month.
It has partnered with David Beckham’s Inter Miami Major League Soccer (MLS) franchise and its star player Lionel Messi to provide exclusive player-focused content during key playoff matches this month.
The “Player Spotlight: Messi” taps into Messi’s immense global fanbase, taking viewers behind the scenes before, during and after matches and is a play by the MLS to capture younger viewers.
Despite short-form content being the platform’s lifeblood, TikTok has also been buying selected live sports rights and its global head of sports partnerships Rollo Goldstaub confirmed placing itself in a nexus of both types of content is the app’s sweet spot.
“We think official rights are brilliant and they do really well on TikTok, but it’s about all of the different behind-the-scenes stuff, the characters of the athletes involved in the sports, the diets, how the training facilities work, the chef making the meals. It’s all of that really interesting rich information that can perform so well,” Goldstaub said.
“Sports is a key vertical for the business. It’s a top-five category.”
Next week: In the final part of this Sports Insider feature on sport’s big tech players, we reveal how Sky TV New Zealand can ward off its cashed-up international rivals and remain a dominant player in Kiwi sport.
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