UP540 The Bundle: Premier League plus points; Apple's Meh Bundle; FIFA's 10 minute YouTube hook

0:00Murray Barnett:Hi there, Richard Gillis here. Welcome to Unofficial Partner, the sports business podcast. And we have The Bundle, which is a regular, long-running and the best sports media and streaming show with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke, who's General Manager of OTT at the streaming service One Football, and Murray Barnett, who's founder of 26 West, formerly Formula One, World Rugby and ESPN. Today, they are dissecting Formula One's debut on Apple TV in America, Premier League Plus launching in Singapore. What does that mean? FIFA's deal with YouTube and a new betting streaming rights deal. And the NFL continue to carve up their rights in the US market.

0:42Murray Barnett:Cue the music.

0:50Murray Barnett:So we're going to start on Premier League Plus. Richard Masters and the FT Summit recently instructed people to stop using PremFlix and start using Premier League Plus. So this is a story that we've nudged on a lot of many times in the past, but it's actually now happening. So the Premier League is launching its own direct-to-consumer streaming service next season, branded Premier League Plus, debuting in Singapore, streaming all 380 matches directly to viewers alongside additional shoulder programming and a 24-7 channel. Richard Masters described it as a strategic step into direct customer relationships.

1:28Murray Barnett:The service is slated to launch from August 2026, in line with the start of the new season. And StarHub has described it as a collaborative trial right okay murray kick us off what's happening so for for a long time the premier league has been mulling over what the future media strategy should be and for a variety of reasons singapore is a great market to test in and now is actually quite a good time for them to do it albeit that there certainly the channel has been mooted for the best part of 10 years and was done in collaboration with IMG way back when. And the advantage about Singapore is multifold, if you like.

2:17Murray Barnett:Firstly, it's a big Premier League market, both in terms of interest and revenue. It's a highly cable to market, which means that it's already future-proofed for OTT. And then the third element is that they're already under contract with Starhub until the end of the 27-28 season, which means that they've got this great opportunity to go out and test this with very little risk being already under exclusive agreement with Starhub. So this new service will be available only to Starhub customers until the end of the current rights cycle. And part of the reason why StarHub are doing it is that StarHub have sort of already said that they're not going to be in the content renting business anymore or they want to get out of that business and focus more on being sort of a traditional telco platform, if you like.

3:11Murray Barnett:So this is something that suits every party in that particular market at this particular moment. It's also very rich, aren't they? It's a small but very rich population in Singapore.

3:21Yannick Ramcke:Janik? Yeah, I think absolutely that it hasn't been a random choice for many, many different reasons that they do this first trial in Singapore, in addition to the broadband connection. Also, there are content sharing policies and regulations that make exclusivity less variable and so on. So I think this has been long in the making. I would challenge the narrative from Starhub. I think that's a bit of a PR spin as well, that they go from content owner to content distributor pure play destination hub rather than having exclusive content but we can touch on that in a second i think taking a step back i mean the premier league has been relatively and comparatively late a late mover in that context i think most if not all of the other big five european football leagues by now have launched any such direct-to-consumer offering in at least select international markets.

4:15Yannick Ramcke:But I think it's absolutely fair to say when the Premier League states that this is out of a position of strength, not of weakness, which it may have been for the other leagues in the past. I think that's an absolutely believable statement. If you are just looking at their international media rights footprint to date, there are barely any white spots. And with Singapore, I mean, you mentioned, Murray, this deal was closed, I think, ahead of the 2022-23 season, they still locked in a significant chunk of guaranteed monies. I think it's between 45 and 50 million US dollars per season. But it was also flat over flat, flat cycle over cycle.

5:00Yannick Ramcke:So I think this has been in general best practice that I as a rights owner don't get this uplift that I expected. I squeeze in some optionality when it comes to rights retention or non-exclusivity to have the option and they obviously and seemingly waited many many years to take this option but to have the option to yeah future proof ultimately their business model in the future and as a result having this contractual rights retention in place singapore was rumored as the first d2c market for the premier league for a long long time okay there's a there's a few things that sort of

5:36Murray Barnett:bounce off it i just want to throw a few questions out really when you say they're late so i my head goes to Apple and AI. And sometimes the most successful organizations don't need to be first, they don't need to take the highest risk, they can look at the market, who have they been looking at? Are they looking at La Liga? Because La Liga have been out and making claims of, you know, numbers and subscribers, etc. So that is that a case study that they're looking at? Or was it just always in their mind that look, we're the biggest, we're going to be able to do this on our own terms. we don't need to do it it's not a burning platform in the way that other leagues might be worried about they've got enormous rights fees flowing in the always the argument against premflix as we used to call it was that why do this when tv is still or broadcasters are still you know falling over themselves to pay you a lot of money so it's interesting they've done it it's interesting they've done it now it's interesting they've done it in singapore if you're running a sort of SWOT analysis of this you'd start to say right okay but what are the limitations of Singapore as a case study where does it fit and where does it not and what are the things about Singapore that

6:42Yannick Ramcke:probably are singular rather than universal yeah I think in general regarding late moving as I said it is from a position of strength the Spanish La Liga in the form of La Liga TV the German Bundesliga with Bundesliga pass the most prominent example probably the French Ligue 1 with Ligue 1 Plus, this wasn't out of a position of strength. This was like demanded by market forces that this was a fallback option because priority one, two and three remains the minimum guaranteed licensing model because it's higher margin, lower operational overhead. You can create budget certainty for the club, which is paramount actually for running a competition.

7:27Yannick Ramcke:And ultimately, it's just a superior monetization form. So that's the priority one, two and three. If you are forced to, then you take the options and launch something D2C. And I think Singapore, I think we discussed the infrastructural and circumstantial benefits of the market. But I think ultimately it also comes down to where do I as a league have the strategic optionality to do this by having retained such right. the Premier League and its strength is a bit of a disadvantage here because most of the international broadcasters are willing to pay up for full exclusivity and again that's like the preference from the Premier League in that case where we have a flat cycle over cycle amount of revenues I think this is where they did a deliberate push to squeeze in like a league operated channel, non-exclusivity, whatever the legal base is.

8:23Yannick Ramcke:And ever since, this was the reason why Singapore was earmarked as a market because it might be the only or one of very few that has that rights retention and ticks all the other boxes that Murray started to list regarding why this market in particular.

8:39Murray Barnett:It's worth mentioning as well that behind the scenes, this service has already existed at Premier League for a number of years. It was kind of built with the migration from IMG to Premier League Productions and is currently available within the Premier League senior management and a few others as a kind of back office tool, if you like, to be able to review anything that's happened at a particular match. And so if you like, all the infrastructure is already there behind the scenes. And so to flip that to be a direct-to-consumer proposal in Singapore isn't that complicated. But I think one of the reasons why we're covering this is ultimately, you've got a Premier League auction that's going to come up domestically in the next 18 months or in 18 months time.

9:28Murray Barnett:And so does this give us any pointers as to what they might be thinking about for its domestic market? Let's talk about that then. Because again, you mentioned at the beginning there, Yannick, Starhub. So if I'm Starhub, and I'm seeing this happening and then I'm every other broadcaster that's got Premier League rights around the world so to your point Murray how does this work what is this a conservative play by the Premier League to say right okay let's go in side by side with a existing rights holder rather than a replacement that feels like a bolder move but again they don't need to be they burnt the right to be conservative in these things but what just talk to me about if you're on the broadcaster side now as you say you've got these windows now where you're looking ahead and saying right hang on a minute i what am i bidding for next time because if they're in the market with their own channel alongside my thing how is this going to work and what's the impact going to be is it are these additional people that they're looking for are they just looking to over time subsume the audience

10:29Yannick Ramcke:over from their own client i think the league and we have seen this with other leagues in the past they are in terms of publicly framing all of this they take all the boxes right this is like an amicable collaboration this is like complimenting not substituting the broadcaster the broadcaster is still a super relevant and super important commercial partner so they are taking all the public all the boxes in terms of public statements and again i think what's the commercial preference It is a licensing agreement underpinned by a minimum guarantee. So especially also looking at domestic, the domestic market, I think the best and the most strategic value that you can get out of all of this is to establish a viable threat that there's an alternative if market is not bidding up to expectations.

11:21Yannick Ramcke:And let's remember that B2B licensing and B2C consumer business are two fundamentally different things and different muscles that also a Premier League still has to train or get in the first place so we should not overestimate all of this it is like or it was a strategic imperative to do this step to be like well set up for the future but best case for the Premier League that this tool and we can discuss whether it's D2C or are you actually owning the customer relationship which was a big part of Richard Marster's statement, this is not the preferred way to make money in the future because it's uncertain and it's probably lower and has a huge operational overhead and skill set that the EPL is not up to par just yet.

12:14Yannick Ramcke:Yeah.

12:15Murray Barnett:Just to sort of remind everybody that the Premier League in the UK currently makes 1.7 billion. in so that was what they would need to get back from a you know a prem fix if it launched in the uk plus the marketing plus the cost of production so i mean that is an enormous amount of money that they'd have to make and so i don't necessarily think that you'll see this in the next cycle but it certainly gives them a next best alternative and allows them to also look at this model in other international markets where you could argue for the most part competition is deteriorating there's there's less sort of people blowing their brains out for rights and individual markets which are not the domestic market of a particular league so you put the u.s to one side that's a slightly different sort of kettle of fish but certainly if you take a product outside of its domestic market why wouldn't you do this and yeah just before we move on i've got a couple questions about what a broadcaster is now because actually when you start to lay this scenario out a bit you start to say right okay if i'm a fan or if i'm a viewer here what am i getting from a broadcaster that isn't there beyond the live game so we're focused on the live game and then there's all of the you know what's now called shoulder programming but you've got the sort of punditry all of that i think it feels like is migrating to youtube anyway the mark goldbridge sort of model there's a bit of it there there's news there's a sort of in the editorial independence question which sky can always say look okay we're not the premier league we you know but we can ask harder questions of which you get to a sort of mutv type scenario where it's like pravda so there's a there's a there are issues there me as a punter paying my fee to the premier league directly here and whether or not actually i'm getting a lesser service for that or i just it's a realization that I'm the sort of Gary Neville I can get on his own thing rather than just sitting in the studio after the game so I don't I'm trying to work out where that bit fits because it's actually quite a considerable thing but also Murray you've talked in the past about the lengthening of what you know a sports show is and we you know you sit down on a Sunday and it there's a lot of ads that are there for the punditry and the game is a sort of proportion of that so I'm just trying to work out what the economics from the television point of view is if that's the if that's the scenario that i'm sort of seeing because they're being picked off by the rights holder but they're also being picked off by their own talent they're being used by their own talent to go and say right i'm going to start my own thing over here goal hanger version and off i go well i think the end game arguably could be a situation where you have say premier league plus then you are fairly loose and free with distribution of clips with the idea being that you want creators whatever you pundits whatever you want to call them to then be going off and doing their own thing and you probably there's probably a little bit of a hybrid in the sense that you do some of your own punditry but you're also actually actively encouraging various influencers and ex players and so on to to take footage and to get it out there because it ends up being effectively sort of free marketing for you but you know if you talk in the old world of sort of let's call it linear tv that the you know the dirty secret is that the numbers drop off a cliff for pre and post and actually it's really there to justify ad sales spend because one of the drawbacks that you have with say premier league is that you only have advertising you know pre post and a half time and that's one of the reasons why there's so many eyes on the hydration breaks and other things which people are bringing in because that allows you to better monetize let's call it the actual live window as opposed to pre-imposed punditry.

16:28Yannick Ramcke:And I think the dirty little secret is that the post and pre-game coverage is cheap to produce and it extends the advertising inventory significantly as Murray said, which makes for an improved return on investment, I guess, on the overall IP investment. But I just want to answer the one question that you stated at the very top of your previous statement, which are regarding who is a broadcaster or what is a broadcaster. I think nowadays everyone who has content trying to reach, engage and monetize an audience is ultimately a broadcaster. That also counts for the Premier League going forward because they are competing in the same consumer entertainment marketplace like everyone else.

17:11Murray Barnett:I don't, I'm not sure that's true. I'm not sure that's true. I like, I know what you mean and everyone's got a phone and we're all publishers and we're all broadcasters. I think there is a significant difference in terms of, and it gets to the back to the Premier League question of what is marketing and what does market, what has Sky done for the Premier League over 30 years compared to the Premier League without a brilliant marketing organisation at the front of it. And that's the bit that, I mean, Masters, you know, talked about it at the FT saying, you know, we are now, what's the phrase he used?

17:43Murray Barnett:Masters has said the league will for the first time have its own customers. So we all like the sound of that because they're the ones with the money and etc. But they are a pain in the ass as well. And actually dealing with them on a day to day basis is, we've always said is if you don't have to do it, don't do it. but that's embedded into the d2c bit is that you're going direct to the people that are paying the bill and that's different than you know a b2b organization i think it's a very fundamental step because i think it's a really difficult constituency of people that you're going to then have to please a couple of points richard firstly this is called the bundle for a reason right so even if we go direct to consumer you know i literally was on the phone for an hour with sky my uk on on saturday trying to save some money on my mine and it's all about the bundle it's all about oh you get your netflix included oh if you take if you pay us an extra five pounds we'll also throw in paramount what you know whatever it is so it is all about the bundle at the end of the day and what does direct to consumer mean well direct to consumer is effectively two three two things It is genuinely direct to consumer and it's wholesale bundling to a wholesale bundle discounted rate to a third party operator.

19:00Murray Barnett:So it's not saying that the likes of Sky are going to go out of the window completely. It's just they're going to have a multifaceted relationship with both consumers and rights owners. the other point that i wanted to just make was i think what you'll see in general with punditry or whatever content creation whatever whatever you want to call it is it's going to become a lot more shouty so you're going to see what happens with c take the cbs coverage in the us for champions league for example now it's not to my taste and it's probably not designed for me but it's very much of a certain type of content which is number one clippable and it's to punch outside of the fact that it comes into the u.s midweek in the afternoons so what they're trying to do is create something which is deliberately whatever the word is funny controversial different because they know that if they created just a very sort of functional you know keir starmer-esque version of sports punditry that's really going to that's the that's the gap that's the gap that we're you know should be well you know i mean this this probably is a great analogy there about you know trump farage and various other people yeah you know who is the nigel farage of of sports punditry but we won't go there right now but the point being is that you have to create something which is going to stand out in a very cluttered market and that's why you know the likes of mark goldbridge again is great clipped content but if you actually sit down and watch it regularly it's not super exciting and i think the matter of discussion is editorial ownership responsibility

20:45Yannick Ramcke:or neutrality the bigger structural shift has been the insourcing of the production mandate right from img to the league operations which obviously also was the first step to create strategic optionality just like the specific rights retention in Singapore was, including that you have much more control over the presentation of the product, but effectively you also expand the buyers universe because especially new market players may not have the infrastructure to play a host broadcaster. And it gives you the optionality subject to rights availability to do things that they have now done in Singapore.

21:26Murray Barnett:Yeah, two points about this. We always talk about how everything stems from the US or everybody's looking towards the US to see what they're doing. Well, for years now, most of the major leagues in the US have had their own production entities. And so it's a natural progression that leagues like the Premier League should look to have Premier League productions because, like you say, Yannick, you have a lot more control over it. there is also another dynamic around how they can how they can portray their league especially as we get into this much more complex world of things like var and so on where it allows them to be able to have a lot more control of the narrative around the the new tools the people that are really going to suffer and you're already seeing this is sports production entities there's massive disruption in sports sports live production at the moment and it's only going to get more challenged for those guys because people are taking productions in-house margins are being cut and technology is really impacting heavily on the on their ability to monetize production yeah yeah i remember um there was at two circles is summit and they one of the things they were talking about in one of the keynotes was that um what to do with the tv compound now because every you know square footage at a golf tournament formula one or whatever it is what do we do with that because we don't need that anymore because it will be remote and it will all be in the cloud so it's quite you know that was quite a sort of chilling if i was sitting there looking at it from a production company's perspective i think you know yeah okay one of the cool things for nerdy sports fans is to go around the broadcast production facilities and at formula one we used to sell that as a sort of an asset to sponsors hey look we'll take groups of you around the production center and i'm pretty sure it's now getting to the stage where some of that is theater rather than actual need because so much of it is being remote or automated is that the sort of production theme park and that is a very that is a very nerdy subcategory yeah right we gotta move on we gotta move on with that because we are you know we're bumping into all sorts of things that we we will come back to but okay next story because i think these are linked in fact the first three stories there are sort of parallels to it i want to talk about fifa because we've had two significant fifa commercial moves this month fifa has struck what it calls a game-changing agreement with YouTube, opening the door for live match content from FIFA World Cup 2026 to appear on the platform for the first time, with rights-holding broadcasters given the option to stream the opening 10 minutes of every match live on YouTube during the tournament.

24:21Murray Barnett:Separately, FIFA selected Stats Perform as its first ever official worldwide betting data and betting streaming rights distributor, with a landmark multi-year agreement granting exclusive rights to distribute official betting data and live streams for selected FIFA properties, including all 104 matches at the aforementioned FIFA 2026 World Cup. Right. Okay. So a few things in there. The 10-minute hook I'm interested in talking about. And what this means for FIFA Plus is another question I've got. And betting and FIFA.

25:00Yannick Ramcke:I mean, we don't repeat all the analysis and comments we did the last episode when the same or similar announcement as a preferred platform for FIFA. I think to remember, you said that YouTube and other groups, so this was the next domino. You had that scoop. I think the bigger thing is rather this push by FIFA. I mean, media rights and broadcasting is still and remains dominant in terms of revenue line for FIFA. But I think it's fair to say that the most dynamic growth areas are now commercial and others. Doesn't mean that there is an imperative for FIFA to keep growing. Also, the broadcasting slash media right side of things.

25:46Yannick Ramcke:I think this preferred form program, which we touched upon last time, it doesn't change anything. And any incremental or new thing is the subject to YouTube, TikTok, and who else may come next. signing agreement with the broadcasting partners of FIFA in any given market. It's just now that YouTube and TikTok have retained eligibility to touch conversations. But this preferred program and for the first time ever, earning and monetizing betting rights is a symptom of this push for monetization. We always touch upon like this sports rights market has plateaued and would be re-addressed as completely disconnected to the structural development and shift that we see in the market.

26:35Yannick Ramcke:Yeah.

26:35Murray Barnett:Murray, let's talk about the 10 minutes then. What's going on there? What do you think about that? Is that new? Because it caught my eye and I sort of thought, well, I don't quite know what would happen, how that works. One of the things that we've kind of touched upon already is this is ultimately just fishing where the fish are, right? So it's going to where the audiences are, which has effectively been a value leak, if you like, for existing rights owners, where it's now giving them wider opportunities to commercialize the product. How the first 10 minutes aspect will work remains to be seen, but I think it's a bit of a, you know, you tend to have the highest peak, certainly at the start of a game.

27:17Murray Barnett:So if it is, I didn't really follow that bit exactly as if it was the just the first 10 minutes, but it's basically to try and make sure that you can monetize the official audiences as much as possible. Because obviously FIFA are continuing to try and generate more and more money from its existing rights partners. Yeah, it's sort of like a microcosm of the YouTube question anyway, facing every sport, which is the sort of discoverability engine. you know is it is it about discoverability yes it is or does it is it a sort of precedent that undermines the value of exclusive rights again both of these things can be true at the same time and are you training audiences you know you might critique it and say you're training audiences to expect free content what you're going to do after 10 minutes is that enough all of these things are always going to be in play because part of the interesting bit about when you talk about premier league and fifa formula one these are probably you know in a different marketplace to then 90 of the rest of the sports industry and they but it's interesting they're making these types of decisions because they can afford to i guess you know janet what do you think about that the

28:26Yannick Ramcke:i think we don't need to argue over the fact that the discovery layer is paramount nowadays and collapse between discovery and paid concern is essential if not vital for for the industry we don't have to argue over this. I think where I would object or disagree is that I think all of the announced in the press release and what TikTok and YouTube are now effectively eligible or allowed to do. They could have done this in the past in case there would have been such an agreement with a broadcaster. So I don't think anything changes here. And let's see actually how broadcasters will put 10 minutes of their live feed of any given match during the World Cup on their YouTube channel.

29:08Yannick Ramcke:I think we may have a couple of them just in order to not be embarrassed that no one has taken on that opportunity because we are going back to exclusivity and undermining pay value. And the matter of fact is that full exclusivity has been sold to the broadcasters. So FIFA didn't have to sell here to the platforms except for the stamp of approval.

29:31Murray Barnett:We talk a lot about what the impact of YouTube is and how it's changing the market. And the thing that has struck me recently is fair enough for my, you know, 18 year old son, I kind of get that. But recently I've had a few conversations of people my age who say that YouTube is their first point of call for watching content. So when they go home and they switch the TV on, I would traditionally go on and switch on the sports channels, but they are out there and YouTube is their default home. And I think that that's the ubiquity that's starting to come with YouTube. So you've kind of got to have them in play one way or another if you're an official rights owner.

30:15Murray Barnett:And not to be that, you've got to, you know, you've got to experiment with this stuff and see what works. And no doubt after the world cup, you know, there'll be a tweaking to it and it may not be the first 10 minutes. It may be whole games. It may be, you know, snippets that are free from from from each individual game yeah but i think you've got to experiment with it because it's become ubiquitous yeah yeah i find it interesting youtube because i i'm in that gang of people when i sit down quite often i just go to youtube on the telly because it's easy but then i find that i'm trapped by the algorithm in my own algorithm i get served the same stuff and you sort of get a bit bored of your own you know it's your own fault because you're feeding it in and it's just repeating it back to you but it's quite a sort of interesting dynamic you think i'm now craving something i actually want something proper i'm going to go somewhere else so i can sort of see the limitations of youtube are quite there i mean and to yannick's point they can do this anyway they don't you know people will be doing world cup stuff on youtube regardless of whether fifa endorses it or not i think i fully agree with the

31:17Yannick Ramcke:fact youtube is an incredibly dominant force in the marketplace i have always said one of the biggest structural shifts compared to when the bundle was real has been that there's no one who has a monopoly over the audience anymore. I think back then linear satellite and cable TV distribution was the go-to system for pretty much every. This fragmented and splintered over the past decade, I would have said, but now we see winners and losers and then increasing consolidate across a couple of winners of which i think it's fair to say is one if not the biggest one if it even gets now into demographic profiles considered the most native or core target audience for youtube

32:00Murray Barnett:in the first place yeah just before we move on to something else i just want to talk about betting and fifa because again it was i was naively surprised but i'm obviously just unpick this for me why is the there's obviously money but there's reputational risk as well so fifa it's commercial ties with the betting industry four-year deals gambling operators live streaming world cup games to account holders fifa prohibits players and officials from gambling related activities so it's sort of squaring those things you know that you know it's not it's an old story but it's it's less about the sort of ethics of it but it's more about the money and how and where the

32:43Yannick Ramcke:money flows and why they've done this yeah i think you've got the ultimately you got where i think this is about terms of this is less about reputational risk i think it's more about the convergence and the cannibalization between today rights and streaming rights in the sense of how does it cannibalize dilute the traditional media rights expensive by both free and pay tv broadcasters. Yes, you have those distinctions how to downgrade the betting streaming rights from the traditional broadcast over resolution. I think you can't even watch in full screen. It's only accessible for active betting accounts.

33:24Yannick Ramcke:The betting operator needs to have a betting license. So there are a lot of constraints, ultimately, in terms of what it does mean practically for the end consumer. But I think the hesitation comes rather from how do the guys who pay the big bucks are reacting to this rather than any reputational risk that may come attached with it. Because it has been privileged business practice to date. I think just the UEFA and Premier League, when we look at football, are like the holdouts. They will all be out for so long, I guess, in the future. I think the one benefit and this in the PR spin around it is that FIFA or any commentary argues that given the vast free-to-air coverage of the WMPR to make the domestic unique, is minimizing the impact on traditional media rights.

34:11Yannick Ramcke:But again, less about the reputation risk, more about stakeholders, including stakeholders who pay a ton of money. And back to my original point, this push for incremental net new monetization as part of the broadcasting slash media segment.