YouTube, AI and the future of live sports: The key trends reshaping sports media

0:04Hello everyone and welcome to a special edition of the Streamtime Sports Podcast. I'm your host Nick Meacham, CEO at SportsPro and fresh back from the SportsPro Media Summit, which we hosted in Madrid this year and last week. It was an incredible event and I have had an amazing experience this year for a number of reasons, starting with the amazing feedback I had from listeners on the ground. Thanks for everyone that came up to me and said hello. It means the world to me when I get a chance to meet many of you and hear from you firsthand. So thank you so much for coming up and sharing your thoughts about the podcast and also your own views about what's going on in the industry today.

0:44Now, for this year's event, we ran quite a different format with a heavy dose of people and content from all areas of the sports media ecosystem. four big themes of advertising, OTT and streaming, social media, technology and production, and of course, the big one, YouTube, which was the hottest topic and on everyone's lips. And I thought I'd spend the next few minutes giving you some things I heard on the ground, key trends across the industry, or key stories maybe just to pay a little bit more attention to. After that, you'll then hear a special recording of the keynote presentation I did to kick off the entire event with some stats and facts and more insights and some questions to chew on.

1:28And I have to say, it was quite nerve-wracking to prepare for, but I think it turned out quite well. But let me know what you think about it. But first things first, here's some of my takeaways from the event. First one, YouTube. It's really working for everyone leaning into it from a reach perspective, But monetization is still tough using any of their native tools. However, there is a bit of a formula. If you have a good audience and have a really creator-led approach to your channel, there are brands spending and spending big in that space. And therefore, making it pay to be there today, not future-proofing.

2:11Kaze TV was the best example we heard from on stage and an incredible case study for the entire industry. And I also talked to them off stage with Sergio Lopez from Live Mode and their plans moving forward. But what was really interesting to hear was these brand relationships, these brand activations that they're running are absolutely funding the entire approach to delivering their content live on platform. yes it's important to have advertising made available through youtube traditional channels but it is all about those direct relationships with advertisers get it right and they are lucrative if you want to learn a bit more about that we will share some of those findings and the conversation i had with sergio offstage in an upcoming podcast but also joe redfern who's a great industry commentator and expert in in the space did a great post on linkedin which i'd recommend you checking it.

3:07I think I might have reposted and reshared that. So you might find it on my channels as well. Second one is AI is fully in motion now. Gosh, 12 months ago, it was just this hottest topic of what it could maybe do for the industry. Well, everyone is using it now. Everyone's using it extensively and heavily right across the sports media landscape. I have no idea where we're going to get to in the next 12 months, but I'm so excited to see it because it is moving at an incredible rate of knots. And with that, I feel like my next point is there is a real underlying change in the mindset and the approach industry execs are taking to this space.

3:47I've never felt more of like an energy of, we want to learn, get our heads around new ideas, actively talk to different concepts, things that are outside the square, in such a creative and open manner that really got me quite excited about how the industry is responding to such a transformative, changing landscape. So something for me to get excited about and something for you, just for those listening, I guess to get some confidence that the industry is in good hands with some of these innovations being talked about. The next thing that I heard and talked about quite a bit and quite a bit of length was the need and demand for more.

4:27It's real. basically tick tock and two circles two major plays in the industry for different reasons coming out and you say you need to not just increase the amount of content you are doing but you need to at least double it think about that for a second double the amount of content you're doing but no one is suggesting you should put more resource into it what they're saying is user technology things like ai and other tools to assist with creation the native apps and platforms and the data and insights that you get from some of these major social platforms is something that's not being is being underutilized by a lot of people so big focus on way more coming out of companies just not needing and using more people to do it the next bit that came out of it for me was we've talked about it and heard a lot about how youtube is really supporting platforms and channels on YouTube's platform itself to go after these rights and opportunities to get live sports on the platform.

5:33In my panel, the Streamtime Sports live recording that we did on stage, I had Tim Cocker, who's the founder of the Egg Chasers, and they were the ones we've talked about before that secured Division II French rugby rights. Now, I was expecting when they did that move, because it was a revelation to the industry, that they've been working behind the scenes with YouTube and so forth. But Tim actually just said, all they did was they doorstopped the chief executive of the French Rugby Federation and said, hey, we want to buy these rights. And that was actually a harder process to get across the line than anything they've done since then.

6:07But already they're seeing that pay off with commercial interest and audiences following them. So it just basically points out that I would always recommend go speak to YouTube executives if you want to look at investing into the rights. But even if you don't, you can still make it happen pretty easily. Now, the next thing is social media. Now, we talk about social media all the time through different means, but it is absolutely the priority for everyone. Now, what I mean by the priority is that particularly for commercial teams at sports organizations, this is the area they can control the most.

6:44And this is the area they are most focused on in enhancing and improving. they want to make sure that they have the biggest audiences as possible reach is absolutely everything for these people and with that drives more commercial upside and performance from sponsorship it is tangible as that greater reach drives greater return from commercial the other thing that came up a lot was the that many people were impressed with league and stark to going deep to sea which we've talked about a lot on this podcast but as well but one of the things that came up in our conversation with Manal Moda and Ben Morell on the panel that I hosted was that their goal of two and a half million subs is a massive number to still aim for when you take into account possible churn after the next season.

7:35They have to get to over two and a half million basically to get close to the media rights funding gap that they had since they went on this catastrophic dive in value that they were getting out of their media business so a lot of skepticism from a lot of people off stage as well as to whether they can actually pull that off can they continue to have this momentum after they get this first 1 million subscribers so a lot of work to be done there is the sort of the the message coming from people if they think they're a chance of getting to that that number another one i hosted a panel with Alex Green, who's the managing director of Prime Video Sport across EMEA, SVP of content partnerships at the NBA, Matt Brabant.

8:20And we talked about particularly Amazon's global partnership with the NBA, which I hadn't really processed how big of the scale this deal was when they announced it. But it is big. It is truly global. And it seems to be paying dividends. And it's a great example of how Prime Video is really reaching big audiences right across the globe. They've already achieved record numbers with Prime Video for the opening to the season. And in my eyes, I thought of Prime as a bit of a more niche audience, a bit more pay TV style, I suppose. But it's just not the case now. They are delivering incredible numbers.

9:00I'm really looking to double down on the fact that Amazon has such a global reach to give NBA way more exposure, which goes against what I was thinking prior to that conversation. Another conversation I had off stage was with BBC Sports, Director of Sport there. And that was interesting to see just that they are, it feels like, he didn't say these things, but I'm sort of reading between the lines. I'd expect to see a lot of change in BBC Sports business in the coming years. He was really impressive. He's come from the athletic and really transformed the way they are thinking about content. but I think they are going to be making big inroads into platforms like YouTube where they don't have a presence and leaning into video much more closely soon so keep an eye out for how they change and evolve the BBC offering in the near future.

9:49Another one is really that linear and OTA over the year is absolutely being left for dead at least in the conversation that I was having Short audiences are there, still ticking over okay, but everyone who was on stage, off stage, was only talking about streaming and YouTube and social really as their priority. They just weren't talking about linear and OTA. Maybe that's because it's a matured or a declining industry or channel of choice, but the fundamental is that no one is excited about that space. Probably the least positive energy I've had around that area for some time. I'd just like to wrap on this point.

10:29Sometimes I take for granted how much I follow and I know and basically from the commentary that we provide across the industry. Many people are not following this space as much as me, even though they do work in the sports media industry. A lot of people who watch the keynote that I presented came back to me with loads of feedback and questions about some things that I thought were obvious. And this is not me trying to brag, more of trying to make the point that for all of you listening in there that we're trying to help educate in the industry. If you're paying attention to what we're talking about, you're probably in a better place than actually most of the people that exist in the sports media industry.

11:08And don't take that for granted. Keep learning because this industry is moving very, very quickly. Anyway, so I think that's probably a good spot to wrap up the key takeaways. Now, the second half of this absolute Nickfest today that you're listening into will be the recording I did on stage. It's a 15-minute presentation with some industry insights and questions and data points that we thought would be really helpful for people to get a bit of a scene set of where we are after the last 12 months in the industry and really what I'm thinking about now as well. So do let me know what you think about this week's pod.

11:41I can assure you there's no further plans to have long monologues for me in the future. So let's keep things moving. It's time for me to hand over to me on stage at the Sports Pro Media Summit. I hope you enjoy.

12:00Thank you very much. Thank you. Great to be here with you all. And thank you so much for joining us here in Madrid. Now, before we get started, I'd love to see you. I can better see you, Liam. I'm going to give this a go. I want to see some hands up from the audience here. Who has been to a sports pro event before? With your hands up. Oh, wow. Good. Good stuff. Now, this week, who has consumed a piece of content editorially by a sports pro?

12:28Who is subscribed to any of our podcasts or newsletters? Nice. Good stuff. Now, the reason I'm asking these questions, firstly, is thank you for your support and for consuming our content, not just at events, but also in between all the things that we're doing on stage. But the reason I'm asking is I think it's a bit of a... There's some confusion coming at you around sports, but it's a business. Sometimes I talk to people that come to our events, and some of them, they didn't know that we're a media business, So I thought I'd give a bit of context that we are absolutely both an event and content business covering the business of sports.

13:02Now, first on context, Sports Pro now delivers over 100 ,000 views on our own and operated website every single week. We have events, obviously, all year round across a number of different countries. But all in all, we're producing over 3 ,000 pieces of content annually across our own channels. that's generating over 3 million views across our digital platforms and network adding various measures whatever you whatever you want to use we are the number one internationally covering the business of sports and sports media so if you're new to the sports pro universe welcome you come to the right place and hopefully over the next few days we're going to give you a lot of insight about where the industry is heading and also after the event continue to engage with the content and subscribe to the stuff we have available through our various channels.

13:51Now, let's take a quick recap of what's happened in the year and what a year it's been in the sports media landscape. Let's have a quick look at Euro. It's been a year of aggregations, mergers, creators getting involved in rights, and then deep break to consumer becoming even more important for some players. Aggregation meaning Google Amazon are absolutely dominating that space, being a host of different partnerships becoming the central platform of choice for many sports properties and non-sports properties. The Zone playing that role as well and even then coming together and creating a similar relationship.

14:24We've seen mergers and acquisitions sort of play out at the high end of the industry with RTL and Sky and of course Rumors of Sky and RTB potentially partnering up as well. Creators in markets like in France where a screen repays six figures for Saudi Premier League rights and also acquired Under-21's French football. And in the UK, we saw Booth's Day could take quite an innovative step, selling lights and giving lights over to Sky, but also to various creators, which I'll talk a bit more about later on, all through YouTube. And, of course, Le D 'Eum made a lot of the headlines that have been for a number of years with the different moves and things that have happened to their strategy and were forced to go direct to consumer fought by DAZN's early exit of their agreement.

15:11Looking towards now the US. Amazon all in on their relationship with the NBDA, even using it as a platform to market and promote AWS. You're going to hear a lot more about that on stage later today when they join me up here. F1 might put it differently, but the fee they wanted and made public led to the R &D having one possible direction, and that's moving all their chips in with Apple. Now, this is a move that Apple needed to make, and has since made a league more significant move by moving major league soccer to general access on their platform. And without it, both properties base a lot, losing a lot of momentum in those markets, in the most important media market for them.

15:53And now Netflix really made its move into live sports. They tried a whole host of different things, building their own IP, running hot dogs competitions, pro and golf tournaments, exhibitions, and now start to be playing a bit more of a conventional game, but all with this events-based model and mindset. They get to make a move into season-long rice deals with the major leads, at least not yet. And of course, ESPN finally launched their direct-to-consumer platform. For me, a little bit underwhelming after all this hype and buzz. But then they had challenges at betting business closing and also a standoff of YouTube as recently as last week.

16:36And of course, the other big players in Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery, always in the headlines, the Temple merger chatter around their futures. Looking more globally again, there's interesting case studies and things happening. You've got out of Brazil, Cars ATV, who really pioneered this creator-led, YouTube-led broadcast model that's put them on the map as one of Latta's leading rights holders. You're going to hear more from them tomorrow as well. In India, IPL continues to break all sorts of records, both from streaming, but also revenue generation even through advertising and they're delivering one of the most innovative platforms in the world.

17:13The Zoe made a lot of headlines, making huge commitments both financially and technologically on the Club World Cup rights that FIFA had, delivering the event for free to all customers across the globe. And to make up the$1 billion investment, they then sub-licensed all of those rights in the shortest window you could imagine to every broadcaster of every market possible who's willing to pay some rights needs for that. And they acquired, as great as biggest KTD operator, Foxcull, in what equates to a share exchange. Now, let's talk about the sexiest and most misleading topic in sports rights. Sports, media rights.

17:56Sports doesn't produce a report each year on media rights values, And I think it's a great reminder for every sports property on how difficult it is to drive media rights directly. Let's look at some examples here. Five sports properties take half of all revenue paid for rights. Five sports keep 80 % of all media rights are new paid. And US makes half of the media rights paid globally, with four other countries almost explicitly focused on football, making a bolt of those numbers alongside the IPL in India. So why is the US so big? I mean, we could spend a whole session talking just about that.

18:39But pure and simply, it is the ad economy that exists in America. The sports feel best that advertising are winning right now. Those that see your ad breaks are struggling to drive value. That's why you saw F1 struggle to get the growth they wanted from any of your steals, yet the NBA and NFL are able to get 3x what they got the previous cycle. And the conclusion really is here, and a reminder, is emerging sports, you and old, need to take a very different approach to the legacy way of working. And all these start-up leagues that are popping up now, that are just not putting in their investor decks at year three, they're going to have a massive hockey stick in media rights revenue.

19:18It isn't going to happen. Now, on to some of the key things we're covering over the next couple of days. And if you don't pay much attention to the agenda, we have four mini forums on these four topics which I'm going to cover quickly. Starting at Lottie Tea and streaming. 40 % of sports viewers are now watching exclusively via streaming services. And streaming services are now paying four times the amount that they were for media rights in just five years. The interesting evolution we've seen in these types of rights deals that are happening are that these major streamers are acquiring not only some of these pop-tier rights, but they're also acquiring and migrating the D2C offerings of those sports into their own ecosystems.

20:04We're talking about EMBA and Amazon, NFL and The Zone, F1 and Apple in the US, and so on. So why are they doing this? I mean, it's pretty simple. It's another way of these broadcasters and streamers being able to get more value out of the relationship they're creating with the audience. seamless upsell possibilities as a result of having that platform on that opportunity to upgrade on platform. Now, when it's for the social media, day-to-day, many sports properties are really their primary focus. 90 % of Gen Z fans use a second screen while watching a max. Think about that number for a second.

20:45You have to seriously ask yourself now, which screen is really the first screen in 2025? 99 % of users don't host content, just consume. However, 65 % of Gen Z are considered themselves content creators. Interesting on the platform ranking side, YouTube clearly leading the way. This is from IMG in terms of rankings through various metrics. However, Adobe is the first to tell you that also is a platform when you're all there tickled new TV. And the others played such an important role in engagement and non-life content and audience building. So are they social platforms or major video platforms alone?

21:24And then on this table, I think it's an interesting one for us to chew on. It's from the Financial Times, where social media consumption is going down. In every group, save the older generation, who, as usual, are always 100 times. The question is, if they aren't on social, where are they going? Some think it's not your revolt against social media and digital. Like me, though, I think it's simply more they're accessing other things. They're on perhaps dark social platforms and they're engaging as not being listeners, but some of them can be exposed at all, it's only otherwise. Now, on to YouTube.

22:01In the past four months, YouTube has side-roppeted to the top of the media conversation. And some of these stats really make that point wide. I mean, you're seeing that YouTube is now the number one consumer platform and all host of other markets, US, obviously you hear that and see that across all social. The 30 % rise in sports viewing across YouTube's connected TV app in 2024 shows the rate of growth and importance of sports on that platform. 20 % of TV during the start up to young age with YouTube as well. So that's the place you can get fans from the younger age. And even a market that's slow moving around screaming like the UK has 14 % of all in-home video consumption being through YouTube.

22:46You're going to hear a lot more about YouTube over the next couple of days, and including insight from Cars ATV, from what I mentioned earlier, from their co-founder Sergio Lopez, who will be on stage tomorrow talking about that. And you'll also hear about how the Blutus Egger leads into YouTubes and creators that I mentioned earlier, including with Manchester United fan-turned-watch-along creator, Mark Boulveridge and the top podcast channel in the UK, The Distribution. And by the way, Mark averages more viewers than StardewK's coverage for some air bill gains. Now on to advertising, which is perhaps the biggest growing focus of screening and sports following the realisation that you need multiple monetisation approaches to make a content pay.

23:32Who are you? Over time, we've looked at advertisers. Consumers are more than happy to consume advertising in their experience. They're not as precious as we thought they were. A quarter of all descriptions now on SBOD have an ad tier included in Active. 81 % of consumers are more than happy to watch them to get it for free. And the majority of consumers prefer personalized ads over ran content. Again, what a surprise that is. but on the the reason that this water is to pay most attention to this, which is that adsorbing sports are just way more effective, driving higher CPMs and they're so effective the big time streamers like Netflix and Paramount are preferring ad hybrid approach to the phenolics of pay-per-view and in the last year changed that approach with light sports as a result of this single-headedly killing off pay-per-view at least for the near future and the only key thing for this event is of course technology and production.

24:33This that could be in a couple of buckets for this to not to include. Around 24.4 billion is lost on piracy each year. Think about that number for a second. It's almost half the media rights number I stated earlier. And that's not going to change any time soon. There's a cultural acceptance of it, media aid going away and people are consuming it more than ever. And especially if we keep working with legacy access models of high cost entry points and don't lead into ad-funded strategies. The next number fact two is 86 % are using cloud now. In some capacity, however, many broadcasters still struggling to make that shit happen from a legacy workflow.

25:15And the final stat there is 80 % of fans truly believe in AI and its impact is going to have on their viewership and viewing experience from 2027. So I'm going to wrap up on these 10 quick five things I'm thinking about and hopefully get some more clarity on over the next two days. One, are high life's now worth more to sport than life? I'm not saying it. You've heard that probably on the various media lines that Adam Silver in the NBA, people in the UK has made it as well. That's a big question that is being asked of the future of the industry. Two, is YouTube really the future of TV, like they say?

25:55Is advertising really a viable monetization channel for live sports now? Primary, I should add. Will media rights continue to dip in Europe? And will big streamers keep making more plays for live sports across the world? How will legacy media react to the moves the streamers are making? How much improvement does AI make to the top and bottom line? Is diversity a viable long-term play? Our creators, the best partners for sports right now. And what mergers and acquisitions are set to rock this industry? Feels like we've only just begun that. So, lots of things to think about. Lots of things that I'm thinking about.

26:34I hope that this sets the scene for what's in store for the next two days. And if you're not already and want to keep better track of all the things that are going on in the sports industry, again, make sure you subscribe to Sports Pro. And of course, I forgive myself for blood, the Australian Fun Sports Podcast that we run weekly covering all things sports media. And of course, available on all sports on all podcast platforms and of course YouTube. Now that's me done for now. I'll see you back from State in a couple of sessions. Thank you and have a great event.