Less than a decade ago, streamers launched as purveyors of their own content. Now, they’re bringing other channels and streamers onto their platforms, transforming into something that looks very much like the cable services that fans quit in the first place.Alison Boulier/The Globe and Mail
There’s not a lot in the historical record about the subject of television broadcasting in the sixth century B.C., but when Aesop wrote his fable about how people should be careful what they wished for, since they might not foresee all the consequences, I wonder whether he’d been thinking about getting rid of his cable TV service.
Over the past decade or so, sports fans have been cutting their cords with glee, thrilled to be free of the shackles of a business that made them pay for services they never watched.
New app-based services, with names such as DAZN, beIN SPORTS, FloSports, Fubo, and OneSoccer, sprung up to serve fans who felt their sports weren’t getting enough attention from traditional broadcasters. You could pick and pay for exactly what you wanted. The Great Unbundling promised a consumer utopia: lower TV bills, ease of use, and an endless buffet of choices serving every niche interest.
Too bad all that TV watching meant nobody actually reads Aesop anymore. Because he might have been able to warn us that we’d just end up with higher prices, consumer chaos, and a splintering of live sports rights that have made spreadsheets a key part of the viewing experience.
The emerging landscape is so confusing to fans that solutions just to help them navigate are evidently worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sportsnet price hike prompts widespread fan outrage
A couple of weeks ago, the startup tech firm SportsBubble sued ESPN in a New York court for allegedly stealing elements of the company’s WatchSports product for the broadcaster’s own Where to Watch feature.
WatchSports aggregates live programming information from multiple streamers and broadcasters into a single app, so viewers can search for the event they want to watch, and who’s carrying it. (To viewers of a certain age, that may sound familiar: it’s called a cable TV guide.) They’re seeking more than US$200-million in damages.
And while broadcasters and streamers were as happy as consumers to break free from their cable overlords – and the significant share of their revenue extracted by those middlemen – it turns out that selling directly to consumers has serious drawbacks, too. So they’re scrambling back onto cable-like platforms that have built-in audiences, such as Amazon’s Prime service, Pluto TV, or (in the U.S.) YouTube TV.
A recent column in the New York Times noted that, after the U.S. service HBO Max chose to leave Prime in 2021, it lost 5.1-million subscribers. It regained only 500,000 of those customers within eight months, according to data provided to the Times by the research firm Antenna. But when the streamer changed course and returned to Prime the following year, three million subscribers signed up within three months, according to Antenna research.
Here in Canada, sports fans can subscribe through Prime to all of the major services, including TSN, Sportsnet, DAZN, the Fubo Sports Network, MLB.TV, and Apple TV+.
And direct rivals are also striking other unexpected partnerships in the belief that they can help themselves by helping each other. Last week, DAZN and Fubo announced a deal to carry each other’s content on their platforms in Canada. It follows a similar U.S. partnership the two companies announced earlier this year.
Last week's announcement that FuboTV and DAZN would pool their resources should serve as a benefit to Canadian soccer fans, who can access Germany's Bundesliga, pictured here, among many other global offerings.IBRAHIM OT/AFP/Getty Images
For Canadian fans of European soccer, it’ll be heaven: DAZN has Bundesliga, UEFA Champions League, and UEFA Europa League (as well as NFL Game Pass and a collection of other sports), while Fubo has the EPL, Serie A, Coppa Italia, and Ligue 1, as well as the Canadian Premier League.
DAZN, which retails in Canada for $25/month, now offers a $35/month service it’s calling DAZN Soccer. The new premium-tier DAZN+, which includes NFL Game Pass, starts at $45/month.
Pricing is not yet available for the comparable offering on the Fubo platform.
In an interview last week, Deidra Dionne, the one-time freestyle skiing Olympic bronze medalist who is now vice president of DAZN Canada, noted the difficulty in getting viewers to sign up for new standalone services, “when there’s such an abundance of content. So, I think you do have to be available where people are, in order to ensure that your content is being consumed. Where it used to be a lot more efficient and easy to drive people to something, I think now the expectation is that you will be where people are.”
In the Canadian sports broadcasting-streaming ecosystem, which is still dominated by the TSN-Sportsnet duopoly, the push for broader “distribution is starting to make a lot more sense,” Dionne said.
“You saw it first with Amazon, looking at partners that can help speak to your base with content that they would like, and I think for both Fubo and DAZN, growing our bases and growing the pie together with soccer content makes sense.”
In a separate interview, Ben Grad, Fubo’s senior vice president of strategic partnerships and operations, acknowledged that consumers are irritated by having to switch from one app to another if they want to change programs.
“For a long time we’ve believed in the power of aggregation … and making it easy to find and not have to switch apps and wonder where content is,” he said.
“We definitely agree that is something we hear customer concerns about – not specifically around Fubo, but just in general in the marketplace. And so we think this is a great way to address that.”
Call it the Great Rebundling: less than a decade ago, streamers launched as purveyors of their own content. Now, increasingly, they’re bringing other channels and streamers onto their ever-expanding platforms, transforming into aggregation platforms that look very much like the cable services that fans quit in order to sign up with them in the first place.
Fans shouldn’t feel too bad about falling for the promises they were made. Hasn’t pain, after all, always been part of being a sports fan?