It is a big one – the United States’ National Football League has closed a $100 billion-plus media deal. Yes, media empires will pay the league more than $100 billion for the rights to broadcast the football games which are actually thrown and caught with hands, except on a few occasions where they are kicked or punted! Of course, the style or format does not matter. What matters is that the staging is so amazing that people are paying $100 billion plus, knowing that fans will pay for them to recover their investments.
The National Football League unfurled its latest $100 billion-plus media deal. The package, which begins in 2023, covers deals with NBC, Fox, CBS, ESPN/ABC and demonstrates the league’s commercial potency. It’s also the first to offer a digital broadcast exclusive — to Amazon — who will take over Thursday night coverage. CBS and Fox retain flagship Sunday afternoon football games, and NBC its Sunday Night Football franchise. ESPN’s Monday Night Football is augmented by two Super Bowls, in 2026 and 2030, and a handful of primetime games through the season for its corporate network sibling, ABC.
That brings me to ask: is it time for Nigeria’s sportstech? I mean, with amalgam of sporting games across Nigeria, can someone use digital technologies to aggregate and unlock value in the nation. From handball to football (the real one) to basketball, there are many exciting things in Nigeria which could be leveraged to build a modern digital-native media empire, based purely on sports.
Forget DStv’s SuperSports – the opportunities are in the homeland.
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But you know the challenge – who will do the real work? I hope someone has interest. Technology cannot just be for fintech, logistics tech and others, sports can benefit from this wave in Nigeria. The Nigeria Football League plays football, but fans do not come for football, they come for entertainment. That is why the programming around the game is even more important than kicking the round leather.
Beyond MultiChoice (DStv, Gotv), Look At Football TV Rights Before Accusation of Monopoly
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The technology isn’t the problem, we already built an architecture that captured majority of that, under a product that is yet to go public.
The problem? The sort of funding you need to make such product go mainstream can be dizzying, it’s not really for the faint-hearted. The marketing, logistics, programming; each of them will cost a fortune, before you now feed into the platform, which is what the consumers interface with, the aggregator is the easiest part.
You need investors who are willing to pour in handfuls of millions of dollars, for couple of years, without expecting returns. In a country where lots of people expect many things to be free, you need to have the heart to bear the initial losses, while you make a case on why it’s something they should actually pay for.
While you are at it, to have rich contents, part of your spending will end up being on training and upgrading the facilities for the sporting organisations that will provide the entertainment, because as it stands, there’s nothing much to package, you still need to do the hard work of making the raw materials marketable.
Plenty work ahead, but it’s a space that holds massive value, more like mining and refining gold…