LONDON – Live sports used to be the cornerstone of pay-TV providers’ bundled strategy.
But, with classical pay-TV subscriptions around the world plateauing, many pay-TV companies are now peeling out sports from their bundle, via over-the-top internet streaming offerings.
Case in point – Australia’s Foxtel, which has around three million total subscribers but which last year launched Kayo Sports, an entirely separate streaming sports provider.
“(It’s) pushing kind of over 400,000 subscribers already in the last 12 months and they’re all new and different customers to the Foxtel business,” says Mark Frain, CEO of Foxtel Media, Foxtel’s ad sales house, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“There’ll be a second streaming service that will launch early 2020, which is the entertainment version.”
The Kayo launches mimic the earlier template set by Foxtel’s former UK News Corp stablemate Sky, which in 2012 carved out its own channels for an OTT offering called Now TV, which was estimated to have crossed 1.5 million subscribers last year.
For Frain, it’s all about consumer choice at the right pricepoint.
“The global streaming platform is a very congested area, but that streaming strategy for Foxtel is giving us access to part of the Australian population that we haven’t traditionally spoken to or they haven’t engaged with Foxtel because the price point’s been too expensive,” he says.
The Kayo Sports app includes new targeted ads, dynamically inserted in place of ads from linear streams.
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
