YouTube offers itself one of the most prestigious sports rights packages: the American football championship matches broadcast on Sunday afternoons, a privileged moment for a king sport in the United States. These ten weekly meetings, called “Sunday Ticket”, will be available on the video platform of the world leader in online search Google from next season, in 2023, announced in a press release the National Football League (NFL).
This contract is important for Google: the digital giant is thus really entering the field of sports broadcasting. Until now, its subsidiary YouTube has been broadcasting content around sport, from the summary to the backstage through talk shows. It had established partnerships in this direction, in particular with the NFL.
The deal is estimated at 2.5 billion dollars (2.36 billion euros) per year, one billion more than the amount paid by Direc TVthe historical rights holder cable satellite operator, 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 subscribers to its paid offers, which are increasingly important in a context where advertising, its main resource, is shrinking. The matches will be broadcast as an additional option on YouTube TV, a package of a hundred cable channels accessible 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 à la carte channels in the YouTube interface.
This agreement is also symbolic of the growing stranglehold of GAFA on global sports rights. Long heralded as newcomers to this market, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have finally burst in, seemingly taking over from telecom operators.
Amazon is the most advanced today: its Prime Video service broadcasts Thursday NFL matches in the United States, and, in France, the football championship, Ligue 1, or the Roland-Garros tennis tournament. In the UK, it broadcasts two days of football 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 football (soccer) championship, Major League Soccer (MLS), for ten years.
Facebook (subsidiary of Meta) has purchased the rights to official content produced 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.