Jonathan Licht says the company has diversified its content and become more flexible for its customers
Broadcasting giant Sky could live without its current access to Premier League football, according to Sky Sports managing director Jonathon Licht, who believes the company has become a content aggregator.
Sky has been broadcasting coverage of English football's top flight in one way or another for 30 years since it first secured domestic TV rights back in 1992. The relationship between the two has been a successful one as both entities have grown in size and stature over the decades since.
Competitors have come and gone but Sky has always had some slice of the Premier League pie.
However, in recent years that slice has been getting a little smaller. With the price of the TV rights skyrocketing year-on-year and intense competition emerging from other broadcasters, Sky has moved to become less reliant on the EPL. Today, Premier League rights are split between Sky, it's traditional broadcast rival BT Sport and the online streaming platform Amazon Prime Video.
Speaking to SportsPro’s StreamTime Podcast, Licht said: “If we didn’t have the Premier League, as upsetting as that would be, there’s been a big push to make sure the business is diversified,” said Licht, who has been with Sky for nearly 25 years. “We hope we never have to challenge that fundamentally, but the business has become singularly less reliant on one individual process or outcome."
He went on to say: “There will always be competition [so we] will try and use that as positively as we can. What we won’t do is let our business get bent out of shape by that competition.”
From competitors to partners
Sky also has a far different outlook than it perhaps did in the past. Sky hasn't been the exclusive broadcast partner of the Premier League since 2007. ESPN and Setanta Sports were initially in the mix at that time but both failed. BT Sport came on the scene in 2012 and was much better equipped to provide real competition, as it did in the early years of its existence, but the landscape has changed now. It's much more about co-operation and partnership than cut throat competition.
Any tensions felt between Sky and BT were fully erased when BT became part of the Sky Q platform. Sky now sell BT Sport directly to their own customers. Discovery, who are said to be entering a joint venture with BT Sport, are also a partner of Sky.
Rather than focusing on outbidding their competitors for Premier League rights, Sky has focused on developing new technology like Sky Q and Sky Glass and integrating other providers into its offering, making its platform much more flexible and far reaching than it once was. All this is good news for the consumer.
This is the key point. In the past you needed to be subscribed to the Premier League rights holder(s) to watch matches. Now even if Sky doesn't have the rights, BT will have them and Sky has BT on its platform, meaning top flight football will always be there in one way or another.
Should an upstart company come along and take the rights, Sky will likely strike up a deal to integrate them into its universe too.
Licht explained: “We’ve moved on as a business, so we don’t necessarily talk about competitors, we talk about partners now,” said Licht. “Virtually anyone who could be described as a competitor for rights exist on our platform.”
Different channels for different sports fans
This consumer-driven approach and desire to be as flexible as possible can also be seen in Sky's choice to grant access to its channels on NOW and its decision to launch specific channels for different sports and let their customers choose which ones to subscribe to.
“We created genre channels, these destinations for certain sports, and we gave customers the ability to be more flexible in how they subscribed,” Licht said. “The reality is that although there [are] clearly single sports fans, the majority of people have a broader interest and like the idea of having access to all of [our proposition]. We’re always thinking about our offering and we’re trying to be focused on customers.”
The future looks bright for Sky after a series of good decisions and strategies. Even if the day comes when Sky isn't involved in the a winning bid for Premier League TV rights, the chances are that whoever does secure the rights will feature on their platform in one way or another, and their customers won't need to leave them in order to see it.
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