Bt Arrival A ‘threat And An Opportunity’ For BBC
Speaking at the Nolan Partners Sport Industry Breakfast Club on Tuesday morning, Barbara Slater, BBC’s Director of Sport, said that the introduction of BT into the sport rights field represented both ‘a threat and an opportunity’ to the BBC, with the possibility of collaborations and partnerships offset against more competition for top-class sport rights.
Check out the highlights of the event at Sport Industry TV.
In front of a packed room of industry executives at Bloomberg’s central London headquarters, Slater admitted that she expects BT’s entry into the market to drive the cost of rights higher, but added that opportunities would also present themselves as a result. The BBC Director of Sport, who oversaw this summer’s broadcast of the Olympic Games, pointed to the organisation’s relationship with Sky Sports in Formula 1 and golf as evidence of the possibilities of partnership.
‘It does offer partnership arrangements – we have partnered with Sky on a number of occasions, so I think we see it as threat and opportunity,’ she said of BT’s arrival in the arena. ‘I think it shows the premium value of top quality sport.’
Slater was confident that despite the challenge of soaring fees, the BBC’s reach means it will continue to appeal to rights holders. ‘We will see further separation and fragmentation of rights, and it’s going to give individual governing bodies choices,’ she insisted. ‘They are going to have to weigh up commercial considerations against audience considerations.
‘One thing is for sure, it is an unbelievably competitive environment. We’ve been busy this year trying to ensure that we have a good rights portfolio, and have signed up some events for significant periods including Wimbledon, Six Nations, Commonwealth Games, as well as a two-cycle Olympic Games contract with the IOC until 2020.
‘If you know that you are facing budget cuts of 20% that’s not easy, and we’ve had to make choices. We still have a share in Formula One which stretches till 2018, and Match of the Day also renewed.’
On the Olympic Games, Slater told interviewer Kevin Roberts that the BBC had received remarkable audience feedback following the Games, alongside record numbers – with coverage reaching 90% of the UK population at some point during London 2012 and 25,000 tweets a day mentioning the BBC.
‘Of the 24 streams, every single one had an audience at some point of at least 100,000, with 24 million people accessing something on the Red Button,’ Slater explained, while Radio 5live also achieved some of its highest ever audience appreciation figures.
‘People were also using several screens at once – even people in the venues. The live text service, if you wanted to stay up-to-date with everything going on, was the quickest way to do that. So there was certainly increased utilisation of those second screens. However, it is important to remember that the primary way with which people experienced the Olympics was through their TV set.’
Slater was also asked about a much-debated topic this summer – the attention given to women’s sport by the national media. ‘When we are covering an Olympic Games or other mixed gender sports, I don’t believe that gender had any bearing. It was all about achievement,’ she said. ‘Fantastic progress has been made. I agree there is more of an issue in some of the traditional team sports, where I still think there is perceived to be a gap in terms of profile. We should acknowledge what has been achieved in many of the sports and as we go forward our commitment to Olympic sport still remains, and part of that will be following all those brilliant women athletes moving forward.’
