The flexibility that OTT offers is one of the biggest selling points for Roku in presenting sports within the platform, said Jason Weber, Roku’s Partner Growth Manager, during the Monetization Strategies panel: Subscription, Pay Per View (PPV), ad-supported and beyond, that was held the first day of the StreamTV Sports Summit.
In addition to Weber, the panel included Kim Hurwitz, CMO of FITE TV; Marc Kohn, Chief Content Officer at Overtime, and Tom St. John, Head of Beachfront Partnerships. The event was hosted by Kirby Grines, 43Twenty. All the speakers highlighted the future capabilities of addressable advertising and the growth of sports betting. They also mentioned that the new SuperLiga being announced for Europe would be attractive for a platform like Amazon and that the NFL Sunday Ticket, which rights are expiring soon, is a property of great interest for any of these platforms that have not yet entered sports.
They also highlighted the alliance made between WWE and Peacock where the platform will have the exclusivity of the events. “We will see many more transactions like this happening in the future,” said Hurwitz of FITE TV.
For Kohn of Overtime, to empower the sports audience, it is important to create communities on social platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok. “You have to be able to present your product in the way that the audience is going to consume it on different platforms,” he said.
Prior to the debate, Jon Goodstadt, Roku’s Director of Media and Entertainment, had a conversion with Tim Peterson, Digiday’s Senior Media Editor, where he noted that they have seen a massive change in the sports audience. He indicated that while in the last year the sports audience on linear TV has declined, on virtual MVPDs it has increased by 137%. He cited the case of the past Super Bowl, which had one of the lowest TV ratings in many years, while in streaming it grew by 45%. “I think streaming has hyper-accelerated in the last two years,” he said.