Sportel Rio Panel: Brazil Searches For New Sports

By Jay Stuart

Participants in the Sportel Rio panel session Tuesday on the Brazilian Sports TV Market – Beyond the World Cup and the Olympics agreed that the country’s three favourite sports are soccer, generic soccer and soccer.

They also agreed that it’s not going to be easy for other sports to grow – but that doesn’t mean there’s no space for new entrants.

On April18, ampoule the 2013 ESPN X Games will take place for the first time in Brazil in the city of Foz do Iguaçu (near the border with Paraguay).

Skateboarding is the number two sport in Brazil in terms of participants, according to German Hartenstein, ESPN Brazil’s General Manager. Brazil is also the number two country in the world after the USA in terms of elite skateboarders as judged by medal ones in all the past editions of the X Games. (Hartenstein is interviewed in iSportconnect’s new Sportel Rio e-zine.)

Werner Michels, Engineering Director of online media company Terra, said the success of MMA has shown that there is room for sports other than soccer. Only a few years ago, MMA was very niche in Brazil and today it is very popular.

Roberto Primo, Director of Technologies of pay-TV platform Globosat, agreed that MMA has enjoyed a remarkable rise over the past two years. Globosat has been investing in the sport for a decade.

But he pointed out that research has shown that only 2% of fans subscribe to pay-TV in order to watch it.

Globosat expanded the volume of sports programming available in its SporTV offer, which now has three channels showing 4,000 hours of live events in a year, 2500 hours taking place in Brazil. The move has not proved as successful as anticipated, partly because free-to-air channels have also expanded their sports offering.

The market is challenging for pay-TV sports, he said. Rights fees are going up, the cost of production is rising and the new subscribers coming into the pay-TV market are from a different social group and not as sports minded as the early adapters. “They want movies first, children’s channels second and sports content third,” he said. “They don’t know as much about sports and need to have more explained to them.”

Pay-TV growth, which hit 30% annually over a three-year streak, is still strong but has tailed off to about half that rate for this year.

In 2013, Globosat does not plan any change in its sports output.

Alex Pimentel, CEO of facilities provider Casablanca Online, said television stations are doing more live events than in the past, largely because live events are the least expensive programming after studio-based shows.

He said an important trend is wider coverage of regional soccer championships from around Brazil on the national sports channels, not only at the top level from but also B and C divisions. Viewers are thus seeing new teams and players they have never seen before.

Hartenstein agreed that there is new sports programming to be found within soccer. ESPN has created Copa do Brasil competitions in under-20 and under-17 categories, giving young players the same sort of exposure as the big-league Copa, and ratings have been better than expected.

Terra offered 35 different feeds from the London Olympics, showing many sports not usually covered on television. It is very simple to add more feeds, so new sports can be added, Michels said. But the production needs to be small for it to make sense because the audiences will be niche.

“We don’t know if there is an appetite for other sports because we don’t show them,” he said. He added, “It takes a lot of time to move advertisers to new sports.”

Primo voiced doubts about the market making more room for new sports. It’s hard to find investors for sports other than soccer.

Investing in new sports is “long-term and high-risk,” he said. Brazilian sport needs infrastructure improvements – even for soccer.

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