And what does it mean for the industry?
Livestreams? Replays? Commentary? Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. According to this study by Variety Intelligence Platform, today more sports fans in the USA prefer checking out highlights rather than watching full games. This is absolutely logical in the context of shortening attention span, something that has been studied and proven too.
What does it mean for the industry? Is it just about watching habits? Not really. Even though at first sight it is mostly about content type and meeting the demands of the consumers, the trend and what it affects is way beyond.
The sports ecosystem is built on live sports rights. If fans aren’t regularly tuning into games, it could threaten the entire model.
Basically, the fewer people watch full games, the more it damages the sports right market in its current condition. At first, the industry blamed Gen Z (as usual) for this — as they rely heavily on social media to stay updated on their sports. But the thing is this trend extends beyond the demographic and progresses even more.
It leaves the sports entertainment industry with little choice — it is either to “adapt, join, succeed” or to “pull a Don Quixote and fight the decade-old tendency of content consumption, trying to make everyone watch their games the gold old (right) way”.
We can add up to that: after a year of calculations and analysis, we can definitely say that highlights make good additional content, accounting for an impressive chunk of total views for an event (see this). And sometimes even generate more views than the game or broadcast itself.
Sportrecs provides everything a right holder might need to create highlights. Studio, the built-in production tool in the partner’s account, allows to create and publish highlights in real-time, analyze them later and add widgets to collect data on the audience. Oh yeah, and it’s free.
Well, isn't that the case of “don’t blame the player, blame the game”?
