What the entertainment industry can teach sport about OTT disruption

A report in the Guardian yesterday hinted at the possibility that BBC, ITV and Channel 4 might be about to pull their resources together to create a British streaming service to rival Netflix, Amazon and the growing tide of on-demand platforms.

Threatened by the growth and popularity of these competitors, and the fact that consuming content through internet-based platforms is now mainstream, it seems like the perfect time for the traditional broadcasters – who all create their own content for their platforms – to work together with a more concerted effort in order to protect their dominance of the British entertainment landscape.

Whilst, on the face of it, this doesn’t appear to be of particular interest to sport, it’s clear that this would be a move in the media landscape that would get to sport eventually.

Spider Cam before a UEFA Champions League match

Since the start of the on-demand craze, launched by the likes of BBC’s iPlayer a decade ago, live sport has been almost the last part of broadcast entertainment to be touched by the change. Whereas music, films and TV have been disrupted massively by the trend towards OTT consumption, sport has only recently seen the arrival of Amazon, Facebook and DAZN come into the mix. One of the reasons for that is the need for sport to be broadcast live, rather than on-demand, and live-streaming is just that bit harder in terms of the tech.

But we may now be seeing that change. Sport is not the same as general TV shows, and so we can’t simply take what’s happening with Netflix and transpose it onto sport, but it’s certainly true that the sorts of disruption we’ve seen in the entertainment sector over the last decade look quite similar to what we might expect to see in sport very soon.

That is, new internet-first media brands coming onto the scene to challenge traditional broadcasters who may have to work together in order to consolidate their position.

Last year, Sky and BT reached a deal to allow their channels to be shown on both platforms in a move which was seen at the time as a response to the growing popularity of OTT platforms.

Given that the entertainment industry is further down a similar path to that of sport, this might be one to keep an eye on.

About author

Chris McMullan
Chris McMullan 831 posts

Chris is a sports journalist and editor of Digital Sport - follow him on Twitter @CJMcMullan_

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