How Netflix and Amazon are using live sports to differentiate their platforms

0:04Nick Meacham:Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the next episode of Streamtime Sports. My name is Chris Stone, the community lead, joined as always by our CEO, Nick Meacham. Now, Nick, as we record this, the Cincinnati Bengals are now on a four-game losing streak still with the absence of Joe Burrow. Although I will say I thought Joe Flacco looked as good as he could have looked. But I am under the understanding, based on your outfit, that you have something celebratory or more positive news than I can share about any team. I support?

0:31Chris Stone:Well, I'll tell you what, I'm not that happy with the Bengals because I have Joe Burrow and his backup, and they brought this Joe Flacker guy in, now my backup. So I have no quarterbacks, basically, to start at the moment, so I'm in a bit of trouble. But, yes, I am, for those not watching, I'm wearing, I think, my only AFL-related clothing. Oh, no, I actually have one, a jersey, they call it. For the Brisbane Lions, I'm currently wearing it, which is not really my team, but kind of is my team. I'd say it's definitely my second or third team, top three, which you can make your own judgments, but I've been out of the country a long time, so I've lost the fandom.

1:13Chris Stone:But basically, they won the grand final as we were recording this just the other day. And actually, a bit of a history connected with the club through friends and so forth. So I've always kept, yeah, they always have a very strong soft spot. I had a friend from where I used to live in the desert in the middle of nowhere who I used to like do loads of sports with. Broken Hill.

1:34Nick Meacham:Broken Hill. Broken Knee. Maybe I'm thinking about my own knees. Broken Knee is even better.

1:38Chris Stone:Broken Knee is an even better name. Broken Hill. And we used to do sports together and everything else and heard nothing from him. Then he popped up and he was one of the leading players for the Brisbane Lions until he randomly got knocked out by, during a game, he just got punched and completely knocked out. there's an incredible footage of it uh a guy called brent staker uh and he was just standing there next to the guy and he just king hit him and he became just as much famous for that alongside his several years in in the uh in the afl and actually but actually now the captain of the team is was actually the younger brother of one of my best mates at high school and he used to be this annoying little pest it always used to annoy us when we i'd go over to my mate's place and hang out and uh he's a pest on the field and he's bloody good at it he's played over 300 games which is equivalent of like probably 15 year career and it's a very physical sport yeah so anyway he um yeah so it's a soft spot soft spot in my heart and uh thought i'd put put it on when i actually put on this morning by chance i'm like it's a sign i should be wearing this and i'm

2:46Nick Meacham:gonna wear it on the pod today gotta do it gotta do it gotta support the hometown always remember your roots and you know speaking though nick of exciting competitions anyone that's listened to the podcast over the summer knows that this year i've tried to make golf a part of my life um you know golf lessons going out golfing and that extends actually watching golf content and for the first time ever i watched the rider cup and i don't know if this is going to be considered a bold take or a hot take or not because like i don't know enough of the golf community to know this after watching the rider cup i would like to start a petition that all golf should be a team competition i'm just gonna put it out there well what makes the rider cup so great is that it's

3:28Chris Stone:novelty value that the team format isn't played all the time um but i am with you about team golf actually so there's a format i don't know if you've played it or i think it's called scramble uh in the uk and uh in australia it's called ambrose is the name it's completely different but it's the same thing basically you play the best shot out of the group and you use a handicap to deduct off your um your net score and that's that that format is just so much fun and i would love to see basically you'd play the best shot between a few of you i think they do one of the games in the writer cup they do they might play that's one of the rounds yeah one of them um but you can play it as a four ball and it's a load of fun because there's a lot of pressure off until it's on and what i mean by that is you yeah four you have four shots to to make it work on any given hold but then you might have pressure where it's like oh we need this to go in otherwise we are we're in trouble and that extra pressure of having the whole team on your back can be quite a momentous uh amount of pressure at that given time so i love the team version of the game uh and definitely think it should have a lot more airtime than it does i actually tuned into the Ryder Cup I had to um uh I've not really watched them much so coming from Australia the Ryder Cup is not as big uh we have the President's Cup which is the internationals versus the Americans it's nowhere near uh as big probably because just the internationals aren't as good as the collection of the Europeans uh but at the time when I was growing up they were we had some of the greatest players to play the game we're playing uh you know Greg Norman um and a bunch of major winners came from australia and it was nick price and um retief goose and ernie ells and all these these great greats of the game that were playing at the time so it used to be a really big competition for us to to go and support and i got really into it then but i just started watching the rider cup really this year probably because it was actually on pay tv channels i never really got the chance to actually watch it um but this year uh again in sweden it's with via play via play is really expensive to sign up for it and they're making it really hard not to sign up to them it's almost like there's something in this sport live sports uh investment strategy um but again it's this whole challenge around okay i want to watch one event for one weekend and they're telling me i have to pay the equivalent of like 65 euros 50 odd pounds a month yeah to sign up for this package that i have no interest in watching after today but would you if you maybe pay 20 30 pounds for the weekend to watch hours and hours would i i probably i would i would definitely think about it uh as a one-off thing um anyway so i couldn't but i was able to borrow a login but only works on mobile but not on connected tvs so um you have to be in the same household as the i know the router that's connected with tv or something i can't remember the specifics so i watched it on my phone and so i went to bed on sunday night when i don't know if you were going down a rabbit hole here but like uh the uh the scores was the europeans were just dominating spoiler alert the europeans were dominating um but then obviously a huge comeback towards the end if you got to watch the very ending but i did because i'm not white because

6:49Nick Meacham:i'm not currently watching the bangles so i was watching the writer cup instead

6:54Chris Stone:uh so anyway well i i basically watched it in my room because i couldn't get on the bigger tv i watched i went to bed but then like tuned watch that i just watch a little bit before i went to bed and then i stuck was glued to my phone in utter darkness because i was yeah my wife was sleeping at the same time and i'm just like and it's sweetened yeah and it's and it's sweetened glued for hours and i'll end up going from a very early bedtime to a very late bedtime watching until uh the result was finally settled and it was absolutely gripping stuff i don't think i have watched a sporting event like that in terms of being so compelled through the last few hours of that that i have in in quite a long time particularly for a tournament a competition

7:35Nick Meacham:that runs over 70 days yeah well you know we we've talked about our colleague joshson and the editorial team does his sports wrap-up, going through some of the big numbers. It did set record numbers in the UK, viewership. So we weren't the only people that found it really intriguing. I think it said, looking at this, it was up 45 % in terms of viewership, 8.8 million viewers across the weekend. That's not insignificant numbers. It was down in the US. They attributed that to the fact that it was not, despite how it ended, was not nearly that competitive throughout the entire weekend. But nonetheless, less um yeah you know then the the ratings round up it was you know very popular over here um i saw a funny joke was like do the europeans have to pick a european venue can they just go play back at the same venue in 2027 since they enjoyed it so much like do you have to play in europe um but yeah i i really enjoyed the format nick uh having never watched it before um to your point the pressure the teammates like i just it opened up a more variables than you get with just sort of you know, single player scores.

8:42Chris Stone:I was actually thinking about this the other day. Can you think of another sport that has such patriotism towards Europe as a collection? Hmm. I couldn't think of anything that came to mind that there's this competition where everyone basically gets right behind a collection of Europe. I don't know if there's any that exists. If anyone listening can think of any, then, then let us know. but i think it's that's another reason why it's such a fascinating competition it's bringing and uniting the european uh countries together which is pretty much uh yeah i don't think happens

9:19Nick Meacham:in any other sport to that level anyway yeah well speaking of we're not the only people to think this and maybe the two are connected or not connected and you're gonna remind me on this because this is before my golf days but apparently there's a revival of the skins game which to my understanding is a bit of a Ryder Cup-esque sort of style in terms of team play, but this is going to be revitalized by Amazon, which I find really interesting because it looks like it's going to play over the Thanksgiving weekend. So alongside what we know, we get the Thursday NFL games on Thanksgiving. Amazon now have the Black Friday games as well.

9:54Nick Meacham:But now we're going to introduce this Skins game with a number of some of the top golfers in this team setup. So my understanding is this has not been played since 2008 so you know nearly 17 years since it's been gone but you know how much of this is people actually like the team style how much of this is amazon sees it as a great opportunity to add more coverage around the thanksgiving day um i don't know nick but it's not going to be the last we're going to see this year of a little more of this style of golf

10:24Chris Stone:well the whole idea and concept of skins golf or is a little bit akin to the rider cup model of match play golf it's it's very similar and what's great about it is it really puts you against the person that you're playing with in that particular group and you think about what sports properties and what just what sports really resonate with audiences and have done for generations and for centuries it's that one-on-one style sport competition it could be boxing it could be tennis it could be those sports where you're up against another individual it's like almost like that going back to the Gladiator days, basically it's one person against one person or whoever comes out the other side, comes out the other end is the victor.

11:09Chris Stone:And I think this type of format will do really well. My main thing when I see something like this launch is, is there a commitment to make this a longer term project? Because we've seen so many things come and go. Netflix have done a bunch of different event-based things. And I just then for struggle to give it my commitment of time. If I know or I don't know if it's a serious play, not just a tool to try and get a, basically a bit of a quick hit, a bit of a dopamine hit for audiences and so forth. That there's actually going to be something of substance behind it. So I believe that with the different stakeholders involved with Prime Video getting into it.

11:52Chris Stone:i think they won't be looking at this is purely a one-off they want to build something sustainable and uh i love the format it just makes everything so compelling because even if someone's having a bad a bad hole that means their round's not over but likewise you can see someone have an incredible hole and result and then someone else has a credible result on the same hole and it nullifies all that great work it's it's a it adds such another dimension to the game uh and it makes is so so much more worth with watching um and if they do it for money even the better yeah well

12:24Nick Meacham:what what i find interesting from an amazon perspective is there's been conversations where at all you know slightly certain sort like the nfl it's so fragmented but it's like you know everyone's got netflix there's anyone actually missing out on everyone's got amazon so they're really missing out on thursday night football and it's i guess the question is and what we've seen amazon do it feels like amazon does is they're very selective um they don't always just go in and you know get an exclusive broadcast deal with someone it's always you know really selective so they used to have the the boxing day um with the premier league now they've moved over to the one tuesday game a week of the champions league it's always kind of pick and choose and there always seems to be a reason for it i guess my question just sort of be do they even need it um like i'd be just it'd just be curious you know sort of what what's the strategy behind it in the sense of i'm pretty sure most people probably already have amazon like i just i think that's more the question is the why what exactly i just it feels like amazon's so just common these days are they are they bringing in any new customers or subscribers with this i mean it's a great

13:29Chris Stone:question i think we've got interview coming out soon where we've talked to someone who's um from you know sky sky deutschland uh uh chaddy class and and he talks he talked much more interchangeably about acquisition and retention like they were the same objective almost you're creating content that kind of wants to do both i think in this instance yeah we've had the same question and we're making the same statements about netflix a few years ago why is netflix but needing to buy sports rights that cost a load of money if they already have maximum a huge maturity of audience And I think the same thing applies here for Prime.

14:05Chris Stone:They'll be looking to test out what impact it has on audience behavior, whether that be retention, whether it be acquisition, or whether we just watch time from its existing audience base on a case-by-case basis. Amazon hasn't been afraid to do testing-style deals. I just hope it's a longer-term play, and they typically have been doing things on a multi-year approach. um i remember when i spoke to marie donoghue was leading the amazon strategy at the time a few years back um the big thing was about they wanted to own a moment right and they wanted to own a period of time and obviously the black friday side of things is obviously a huge thing for them because the commerce uh commerce aspect of it right that that is their business so being attached to black friday is such a an important thing and so they would present one pages to bezos and say like here's what we think this is great here's what we think is going to move the needle for us what do you think and they they get the sign off and they go for it and i think this is just they want to own these moments in the calendar which can drive ultimately engagement some things are just about value for prime video and in this instance it's a value for the prime video customer but it's also potentially driving customers directly to their biggest um one of the biggest days of the year driving customers to the platform itself to hopefully convert into um some

15:27Nick Meacham:further revenue true true it's probably right nick i'll still ask why but that's probably it's probably where the answer's headed and you know we've talked about netflix we've talked about champions league now the two of them have a bit of a again just all these analogies all that where there's smoke there must be fire sort of things and there's a story coming out you know that netflix is interested in bidding in a uefa champions league rights deal um what's been reported is that this would be similar to the approach amazon did those that aren't aware at least in the uk amazon prime gets their their choice of the tuesday round of games the rest of them are all the tnt sports my understanding is this would not be netflix coming in for some sort of global exclusive deal for all the champions league rights but they want one game per round um those that aren't aware the Champions League has massively expanded the amount of games that it has.

16:20Nick Meacham:So perhaps if Amazon gets their choice of the Tuesday game and TNT gets the rest, it may be this is something like Netflix gets their choice of the Wednesday games and the rest are on TNT. That's just sort of what has been proposed. UEFA is looking for a pretty significant expansion in the rights. My understanding is they're currently around$4.4 billion is their global set of deals. they're looking to push north of five billion so you know nice growth good in there and you know having more competitors and splicing up your packages is one way to do that that's why the nfl i think is so great is that they're always able to carve out a new package whether you know they had the initial deal but then they introduced youtube tv then they introduced the netflix and they're always finding a way to carve deals so it seems like uefa is probably trying to take that similar approach to reach north of five billion but what do you think nick does it make sense for netflix to take an approach like this i understand why ua foot would like it but you know does this kind of just we want the one game we don't want the full thing we just want the one yeah well they

17:25Chris Stone:obviously they have been very focused on events based um investments um the most regular investment i have made is in the wwe right it's the yeah i think it's the monday night uh raw i think it's called. I've forgotten which one it is. And that's the closest thing they've got to something that is a regular, a recurring entity. And now they've added so many more games, obviously their expectation or hope is they will extract more value from the media rights that they now have available. You also have to layer on that team marketing who have been running those rights for such a long time have lost those to relevant sports who are based in the US.

18:01Chris Stone:And I'm guessing they've been very bullish with the commitment they've made financially to having this deal come to the fore is that Revellant Sports believe they can get a big deal out of a streaming partner or two. And naturally, Netflix coming to the fore will be a huge win just for visibility if they do can make this commitment for UEFA. The challenge will be for Netflix, they've been very clear and they're still clear today about they are, what was the line? Pro-profit, I think the co-CEO used when referring to the expensive nature of sports rights. So they aren't going to be looking to pay a premium for these just so they can say they've got the UEFA rights.

18:45Chris Stone:It's not in their interest. They will pay what they think is fair market value for them and definitely no more. So the notion or the story that they are bidding for these rights, yeah, they might be, but they probably have a bid for everything at the right price these days. They've got enough of the breadth of stuff, but they're not going to outbid the bulk of the competition. So I believe that Champions League and UEFA itself will have to make a commitment. Do we want to basically pull this card, take a haircut on this one game a week with a view that we can get a streamer on board, potentially get them interested for something bigger down the line, and just create more competitive tension in the market?

19:26Chris Stone:Otherwise, I don't see Netflix making this play unless it's for a very favorable price for them.

19:33Nick Meacham:Yeah, well, what's interesting is, I believe his name's Greg Peters is the CEO of Netflix, maybe the co-CEO. He mentioned they were talking about the NFL and sort of to your point, you know, these events-based things, you know, they're happy with the Christmas day. It's a one big day. And they were saying it doesn't make sense for them in their model, kind of along the lines of you were talking about from a price perspective of doing these seasonality things. And one of the things they mentioned is partly because they can't actually measure what success would be for that how many people would actually need to watch how much money from advertising what it actually cost to balance that all out so what i find interesting about the champions league thing and we'll talk about the the comments separately is if is that just an american approach i mean obviously the champions league is more european but i imagine it have a global element like are they just saying they don't want to do it with the american business or because the nfl is just going to be on such a different cost point that you know those are separate but it almost seems like if you don't want to do this seasonality approach does that almost conflict with the purported interest in the champions league because that would take place basically from september kind of all the way through like marchish time because once you get the knockout stage i don't think amazon's involved anymore so you know it's a long time so i'm just a there's the does it match up with what they're doing because you did say they had the wwe but then on the other side and probably the more interesting side is, you know, Netflix is saying they don't know how to measure success.

20:57Nick Meacham:Now, what does that maybe say for everybody else when it comes to bidding for sports rights?

21:01Chris Stone:Yeah, I mean, just them saying that blew me away, right? To think about Netflix, one of the most technologically advanced companies in the entire world, would struggle to identify what's providing value and what's not based on having them for a seasonal perspective. But I get the point. I think that most people would understand that. And so that's why I think their potential interest, that reported interest in one game a week makes makes a fair bit of sense it leans into that event style weekly uh experience that they've got with the wwe but i don't think the wwe experience is has it it's it has started from memory right maybe they've seen that that's worked for them in some capacity and so they're interested in taking that weekly approach with something without committing to something which is a defined like needle mover for subscribers like this there's no way that this would be a acquisition play for one game a week this is a very much a retention play yeah if you are committing such a minimal minimal amount of time but it can just allow them to build out their catalog of stuff to make people excited and and also market more heavily around those events to drive and drive people to the platform um when those when those key matchups are happening because i believe they had um i'm not sure if you said it but a selection of the first picks in certain rounds yeah part of the the reported framework but yeah i i ultimately think that's they're going to be mentioned in every single global deal now moving forward the new apple yeah the new apple but they've actually followed up with uh delivering and then some which uh apple is still up in the air until this point until we actually see this movie, I don't know if we weren't going to cover it, but if you've seen recently, now the report is like, that F1 rumor is still going with them that they're going to buy those rights.

22:52Chris Stone:But now they want to shut down the F1 TV Pro product as part of that, or maybe integrate them to their own platform. I mean, hell on that rumor mill is going to go is anyone's guess. But anyway, back to Netflix. Ultimately, I think you're going to hear more of these. I think they're up for pretty much buying anything now, Netflix, for the right price. And they've just said, And you look at their library of stuff from an entertainment perspective, it kind of shows you that they do. So I think that they'll be up for it if UEFA Champions League and indeed relevant sports sees, in my view, sees them taking a haircut on the value of those rights will be worth it in the long term.

23:32Nick Meacham:Yeah, well, it's interesting. You referenced the interview we did with Charlie Clawson. And to be honest with the listeners here, we did that interview about two hours ago. So Nick and I, we're just talking ourselves to death here today. But what he talked about as well, just sort of the idea that, you know, pay TV, it's not just about the sports, right? You're going to have the family members. You're going to have to have all the other entertainment. That's where the Netflix side of things comes in. It's not really about the sports. Sports is actually the minority element of it. I think one of the interesting things about the WWE is this isn't to get our colleague Steve McCaskill fired up.

24:02Nick Meacham:It's obviously stage. I think WWE has a larger opportunity for playback video on demand, like catching up on things. Whereas it feels like with live sports, like I'd be curious and let's just say they have PSG Barcelona on with that footage and stay on Netflix for me to go watch on demand later. Or would it, would it disappear? I've not actually, cause I'm not on the WWE platform. I don't know what the on demand accessibility is on Netflix, which would be interesting. Cause I'm not even sure if I've seen it on Amazon prime. They'll usually let you start from the beginning. I mean, I'm trying to remember if I've ever been able to go back and watch on demand.

24:34Nick Meacham:That would also be interesting to sort of the WWE comparison to something live sports.

24:40Chris Stone:Now, that's an interesting point. I remember seeing for the Canelo fight that they had recently, the numbers they shared. I think they were about 20 % extra, if I remember the number correctly, after the fight. They were on demand, came afterwards. So that's a decent number, I think, of on demand consumption. And I did notice for some of their other events that they did have an on demand access to it. component to that, it would just ultimately depend on what UEFA's also rights framework is and whether they allow there to be an on-demand component. I would imagine that Netflix wouldn't do that deal without having that available to some capacity, just because that seems to be their approach for other sets of rights.

25:20Chris Stone:They've had other sets of events they've had. So we'll have to wait and see. Like I normally say is I'm kind of excited about if they do it and they keep making a play in this space i know that relevant um relevant sports will definitely want to get this done not just from the financial perspective but also for then to be able to go to the uefa team in switzerland and say hey look we've put you on a global scale now that you we've never been able to do before

25:46Nick Meacham:by bringing netflix to the table because remind me how recently did relevant take over we covered that story it's like well very months ago it's not been that's not been that long because they been with uh was a team marketing for like the 20 30 years previous to that yeah they have been um

26:03Chris Stone:it was it was announced gosh i'm not actually sure when started this year end of last year that they were going to lose those rights and this was the final cycle this meant the team basically had to continue with the delivery before stepping away uh and relevant taking over uh this this cycle so it's only fairly fairly recently and you've seen team marketing therefore have to make a huge pivot now team marketing's legacy is basically they were effectively kind of part of uaefer that their whole business was built around that uaefer relationship for all of these years and they were the first to basically create this whole commercial standalone entity at the time that specializes in monetization and commercialization of the sports rights um so they have been built solely on that so for relevant to come in and take that that has been has meant that team have really had to start pivoting their approach and business and i've seen and they have been i've talked to their ceo previously um and they'll be making some changes already in the event that this might happen uh i think more recently they've basically been announced which is a bit of a different play for them but partnering i think with the ballers league to help them monetize and commercialize globally as well.

27:17Chris Stone:So it'd be interesting to see if they're able to lean on those existing Champions League relationships they've had with all the broadcast partners and expand the visibility of the Ballers League globally.

27:28Nick Meacham:Yeah, well, we will follow that story. Again, it seems like when we do these news stories, the more cyclical they get, Nick, we can never quite get rid of them. So I'm sure, you know, even speaking to Charlie, Sky Deutschland is going to have their own conversations, the champions league so there'll be more stuff to come um from those conversations but moving to the next story nick uh looking at the ecb so talking about cricket now um obviously something you're more familiar with your australian background i'm sure our colleague george brier who'll be in australia i think by the time this podcast comes out we'll be listening to it because i believe the ashes is coming up what in december nick yeah that's it i think that's

28:05Chris Stone:probably one of the reasons you'll see george there and keep an eye out for him in the live live broadcast he'll be wearing some sort of crazy costume probably absolutely but they've come out

28:14Nick Meacham:and they have been talking about their broadcast deal and they've got a split between sort of free to air coverage and sky coverage but i think the thing that you wanted to pull out of this story was them talking about that they think digital clips are arguably as valuable as some of the stuff they're doing free to air which i suppose is interesting for an organization like the ecb and i think the reason you called it out is we've seen people like the nba really pivot to this sort of the value in digital clips. I think the NBA are probably one of the front runners in terms of embracing some of the content creators, YouTube and things like that.