Facebook recently paid €225 million, outbidding BeIN Sports and Fox Sports Asia for the rights of providing live English Premier League broadcasts in Asia.
Peter Hutton
This is the first big move by former Eurosport CEO Peter Hutton, who was hired earlier this year by Facebook precisely for this purpose. He leads the negotiations in a deal which will give the social media platform exclusive rights to show all 380 league games per season in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, all Asian countries with an enormous British football following.
Hutton is a Cambridge University graduate who began his media career as a 16-year-old boy. He has worked for Sky Sports, BBC, Fox Sports and Eurosport, has launched his own sports channels and sports shows and was named sports executive of the year in 2015. No wonder Facebook hired him to help them penetrate yet another new market.
Online livestreams – the future of sports broadcasting
Facebook previously livestreamed MLS and La Liga matches, showing initial signs of the desire to enter the sports market. Their latest €225 million investment means they’re taking this seriously. Facebook is far from the first company to buy broadcasting rights in order to give followers a chance to watch games on their platform. Just recently, Amazon Prime bought a package to air 20 live Premier league fixtures per season in the United Kingdom, starting from 2019.
We are seeing the first moves in what is a global trend of escaping traditional TV broadcasts and following sports on the go. ESPN revamped its entire company in order to adapt to the needs of the new millennium, offering more live online streams and less live TV shows. DAZN is a new service which offers live and on-demand streams to Canada, Japan, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Its parent company is led by former ESPN president John Skipper and in May announced a major boxing broadcasting deal which will introduce it to the American market.
YouTube and Netflix have their own sports documentaries and it’s just a matter of time when they ask for their piece of the lucrative pie.
