Facebook hasn’t tipped its hand, but industry insiders believe the website will be a bidder for Premier League streaming rights. (Photo by Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Facebook’s entry to sports livestreaming, to date, has been piecemeal and tentative, either simulcasting a broadcaster’s feed of weekly Major League Baseball games or Champions League soccer matches or exclusively producing feeds for minor conference college football games or of sports outside the mainstream like snooker and surfing.
Despite protestations from the company that a strategy is still being formulated, executives on the outside are speculating that the social media giant will be — and already has been — an active player in bidding for more substantial sports rights packages. Both Manchester United vice-chairman Ed Woodward and advertising guru Martin Sorrell, head of WPP Plc, have recently stated their belief that Facebook and Amazon will both be contenders for the next round of Premier League soccer streaming rights, with Woodward even reportedly saying that there was “incredibly strong interest” before the prior rights deal that began in 2016.
Facebook did recently bid $600 million for the rights to cricket streaming in India, although it lost out to an offer from Fox-owned Star India that bid $2.55 billion in a joint television and streaming package. Its global head of sports partnerships, Dan Reed, recently said at a roundtable, according to Bloomberg, “It is premature to speculate how we might approach that.” He added, “It’s still very early days. There is no template.”
One of the issues that poses some inherent potential for conflict is that Facebook isn’t just a streaming platform but a massive social media with huge numbers of existing business partnerships. Many media companies advertise on Facebook to drive viewership, but the relationship could be strained or worse if Facebook becomes a competitor for bidding rights.
“The Premier League is a very important partner of ours,” Reed said at an event in London, per the Guardian. “We work with them to help them reach their audience. It would be premature to speculate on how we might approach that.”
Reed declined to commit one way or the other if an offer would be submitted for Premier League rights. Amazon, for its part, did the same at a recent kickoff event for its NFL Thursday Night Football package, with two of its executives electing not to comment on Woodward’s remarks.
So far Facebook has accrued a motley assortment of deals with simulcast livestreaming of 46 Mexican soccer league matches, 22 Major League Soccer matches, 20 MLB games and more than a dozen Champions League matches. Its exclusive deals are with Conference USA and the Mountain West Conference for a total of 15 college football games, as well as the NBA D-League (roughly 520 of the 570 games) — Reed was formerly D-League president — and more niche sports like CrossFit, surfing, darts and snooker. Referring specifically to the latter two, Reed said they “found an audience” on Facebook.
In all, the website hosted 3,500 live sporting events in the first six months of 2017. There have been a few one-off events, as well, including a soccer match between Manchester United and Everton and an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings that was available only to users in India.
“We aim to collaborate with broadcasters where possible, but there are also situations where we will collaborate with the rights holders,” Reed said.
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Indeed, the speculated Premier League bid would hardly count as surprising, especially not after the known offer for the cricket rights.
“[Facebook’s bid] is still significant because it’s such a large amount of money in a market that’s still nascent,” Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser told the Daily Mail. “It clarifies that they intend to be a real player in traditional premium video content.”
One other giant clue resides on Facebook’s job board, as the British media news site Campaign discovered. A recent post seeks an executive to oversee live sports partnerships and programming for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
