The inflation noted on the rights of retransmission of certain sporting competitions is not generalizable. Indeed, even on a very competitive market, not all sports have the same interest for the channels: some, by their nature, are too difficult to program despite their real popularity, or else do not offer enough competitions at the right time. To be subject to inflation. As for the leagues, they may prefer the visibility provided by the big chains to the deep-pocketed outsiders, especially when their resources depend very partially on sports rights.
By trivializing access to video on demand in homes
The Internet has considerably diminished the interest in stock programs for television, which are often pirated, exchanged, “already seen”. For the channels, live is therefore the most effective way to retain viewers and mark their difference from the promises of online video. For live programmes, sports programs are among the most unifying, at least for major sports: football, rugby, tennis in most countries, basketball and hockey on the other side of the Atlantic.
Therefore, inflation on rights seems inevitable.
But sports rights do not have the same financial importance for all leagues: when they represent only a tiny part of the financing of sport, ceding rights to an outsider, it means losing visibility and therefore revenue from sponsorship, ticketing, etc. Other arguments explain why inflation is not always true. Channels sometimes need a sport to establish their notoriety and the strength of their brand. They thus gain with certain prestigious matches a share of the visibility and the aura of the team of which they are the broadcaster. But the exercise can be very expensive, to the point sometimes for the channels to look elsewhere for the means to strengthen their brand image. The right price for the rights, between visibility for the leagues and notoriety for the channels, is therefore always the result of arbitration which explains why we cannot compare football, rugby or even tennis, from the sole angle of television 무료스포츠중계 rights.
Football in France and the United Kingdom
In the delicate equation between the cost of rights and visibility, football is doing well. This sport in fact enjoys such popularity that it can take the risk of inflation on rights, including when this leads to less exposure of matches. It is football that brings visibility to an offer, and not the other way around. This situation can be seen in France and the United Kingdom, where the market configurations are nevertheless different. Long a monopoly or quasi-monopoly of the Canal+ group, the French Ligue 1 is now the subject of very tough competition since the launch of Hulk-tv on 1st June 2012. To impose themselves, the new Qatari sports channels indeed need the visibility of football and in particular of Ligue 1 which, by its “serialized” dimension, is able to retain subscribers.
If Hulk-tv did not outbid massively on the Ligue 1 rights it acquired, it forced Canal + to outbid the best matches, bought 420 million Euros per year, when the encrypted channel had all of Ligue 1 for 45 million Euros more during the previous call for tenders (see REM n°22-23, p.29). Acquiring the best Ligue 1 matches was crucial for Canal+, which would otherwise have lost one of the main reasons for subscribing to its offer.
