BT Sport sign YouTube deal – Exclusive reaction
May 12, 2016
BT Sport will screen both the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League finals live on YouTube at youtube.com/btsport and bt.com as well as it’s BT Showcase channel.
John Petter, chief executive of BT Consumer, said: “We’ve always said we wanted to give top quality sport back to the people and making the UEFA Champions League and Europa League finals free to everyone in the UK does this in a big way.”
“We’re also bringing BT Sport to a new generation of younger sports fans who view their entertainment online, through social media and on their mobile devices. We plan to make these finals the most social sports broadcast ever, with lots of exciting content in the build-up and on the night across YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Vine.”
It’s the first time the finals will be screened in this format and Stuart Ferreira-Cole, Regional Director for Western Europe at video technology experts Ooyala believes BT Sport are prioritizing audience reach.
He said: “All sports TV and video rights owners grapple with whether to prioritize reach and audience size by going free to air, or monetization and data insights by putting live sports behind a paywall.”
“In this case it seems BT Sport is choosing to prioritize reach and size of audience for these two games so as to grow awareness of their investment in European football rights and ultimately to drive awareness of BT TV and Broadband. They are using these games as a sort of loss leader for their subscription products.”
“Offering the games on YouTube also shows how many of the digital mega-platforms are increasingly making a play for live sports, as we also saw with Twitter’s NFL live-streaming deal in the US. Ooyala was recently announced at the F8 conference as a launch partner for Facebook’s live streaming product, meaning our customers can now easily syndicate their live streams to Facebook. One thing is for certain: BT will be paying very close attention to the success of these streams on those various platforms, and using analysis of viewing trends to determine their future content strategies.”
“This is why Ooyala has always been very focused on video analytics – without that type of insight it’s difficult for sports rights owners to make optimal content distribution decisions going forward.”
For more information about Ooyala click HERE.
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