The changing face of the sports rights landscape is continuing apace.

Last month Eleven Sports picked up rights to Serie A to add to their La Liga coverage. Then they also announced that this month’s PGA Championship will be available on their platforms – and streamed for free, too.

This week, BT Sport appears to have lost the rights to UFC and NBA whilst their rivals Eleven Sports and Sky Sports could be the ones to pick up the new business.

That would be another big loss for BT, though they still have the Premier League and the Bundesliga as well as boxing and motorsport: that is, they’re still a massive draw for subscribers.

For Sky, it would be a coup, bringing more sport to their platform after losing the rights to PGA Tour golf content to Discovery and La Liga to Eleven Sports. But the landscape is definitely changing.

Over the last few weeks Eleven Sports have been whirling their way through the sports and have created a varied portfolio containing football, golf, and now possibly another sport entirely – MMA or basketball.

The announcement of their golf coverage hinted that they won’t be afraid to come in with a fresh angle on sport, too, bringing in the likes of Seb Carmichael-Brown to add a youthful vigour and social media savvy to the coverage. And that might explain why UFC could be such a good fit for the platform as it hopes to extend its portfolio even further.

MMA, thanks to its short, sharp format lends itself quite well to social media, and its dedicated online following also makes it attractive to a digitally minded platform intent on tapping into new media.

NBA, too, is growing in the UK and Sky Sports has been home to the NFL for the last few years, too. It makes sense that they’d want to add the NBA to their portfolio. Indeed, part of the growth of American football in the UK stems from the look and feel of the US sport on TV. Sky has endeavoured to keep US ads in some of the commercial breaks, allowing their viewers to experience the exoticism of watching a ‘foreign sport’. Perhaps we’ll see a similar approach with basketball, too.

Of late, the NBA’s own social media accounts have been using live video particularly well and if Sky (or indeed Eleven) were to pick up those rights to next year’s competition, it would be interesting to see if they were able to make the most of that on their own digital platforms.

The landscape may be changing, but in all of the upheaval one thing is clear: that live-streaming, on-demand video content (beyond just highlights) and social media are vital parts of the change.