YouTube offers itself one of the most prestigious sports rights packages: American (Site notre bureau spécialisé) championship matches are broadcast on Sunday afternoons, a privileged moment for a king sport in the United States. These ten weekly matches, called « Sunday Ticket », will be available on the video platform of the world leader in online search Google from next season, in 2023, an announced in a press release the National (Site notre blog d’information) League (NFL) .
This is important for Google: the number you have is real in the field of sports broadcasting. So far, its YouTube subsidiary has been broadcasting content around sport, you summarize behind the scenes through talk shows. It had established partnerships in this direction, in particular with the NFL.
The agreement is estimated at 2.5 billion dollars (2.36 billion euros) per year, a billion more than the amount paid by DirecTV, the cable satellite operator incumbent holder of the rights, according to the New York Times. However, this figure includes resale to the many bars that broadcast the matches.
Attract to paid offers
With the Sunday Ticket, YouTube hopes to attract subscriptions to its paid offers, which are increasingly important in a context where advertising, its main resource, is shrinking. The matches are broadcast as an option on YouTube TV, and a package of around a hundred cable channels available for 65 dollars per month (61.40 euros). So far, this service does not exceed 5 million subscribers. The meetings can also be viewed as a separate program, subscribed via YouTube Primetime Channels, which allows you to subscribe to pay-per-view channels in the YouTube interface.
This agreement is also symbolic of the growing stranglehold of GAFA on global sports rights. The long temporary workers announced as new entrants on Marche, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple ended up bursting in there, seeming to take over from the telecom operators.
Amazon is the most advanced today: its Prime Video service broadcasts Thursday NFL matches in the United States, and, in France, the (Site notre bureau spécialisé) championship, Ligue 1, or the Roland-Garros tennis tournament. In the UK, the broadcasts two days of (Site notre bureau spécialisé) and tennis. In Germany and Italy, one of the days of the prestigious Champions League.
Apple (AppleTV +) has acquired the world rights to the United States (Site notre bureau spécialisé) (soccer) championship, Major League Soccer (MLS), for ten years.
Facebook (subsidiary of Meta) has bought the rights to official content around cricket matches in India, where the sport is revered.
In a phase of conquest, the digital giants will then have to prove that they can find an economic model for the distribution of these rights. After a frenzy of purchases, telecoms had abandoned them, unable to make them profitable.
