TV sport: Bud & FB hint at the future

News is that Budweiser is set to broadcast an FA Cup match on its Facebook page soon. The social network appears set to offer an unprecedented opportunity to deliver unique 1:1 content to individual brand loyals without any distracting DRM issues affecting either the brand or the content owner. What chance more brands will want their content delivered this way in the future?
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Some time ago I posted about what I considered was the untapped relationship-marketing potential of Formula 1, steeped as it continued to be in the world of free-to-air television and its somewhat retro business model.

A big blow to those cobwebs came with the decision that Sky should pick up the slack left in the British broadcasting market by an impoverished BBC. It will be BSkyB and their SkyGo network who will be track-side next year for most English-speaking viewers around the world (in the UK and all those countries which used to take the BBC feed).

But more recently comes an experiment which goes closer to the heart of what is a possible way forward for all those sponsors whose tens and hundreds of millions in investment dollars ensure those little jet-like vehicles continue to go round and round Mr Ecclestone’s tarmac mulberry bushes as regularly and as quickly as they do.

Thanks to a new sponsorship agreement with the Football Association, Budweiser is set to pioneer a unique content offer to its Facebook followers. The match between Ascot United and Wembley FC will be first live football game to be streamed on this most social of networking sites.

It is a harbinger of what every high-spending sports media partner is likely to want to deliver to its own loyal customers and brand followers in the future.

1 note

May 12, 2011

herring

This week brought a clutch of new stories quoting Formula 1’s powers-that-be (or should that be singular) rubbishing the notion that the “sport” could survive behind a Murdoch paywall.

We have not been presented with any details of what an alternative rights regime might look like but there appears no pressing reason to believe that any new media owner would immediately capsize the sport’s existing relationships, so the issue seems irrelevant. But describing a potential buyout as “suicide” for the sport is simply daft.

As I write, News International is reportedly rethinking their plans for a paywall for the website of their powerful tabloid, The Sun. This has made headlines because it appears to contradict Rupert Murdoch’s very public and personal investment in his corporation’s paywall strategy. It would be surprising, therefore, if it were to turn out that News International were prepared to be more dogmatic about F1, a toy which already works so well.

The “Paywall Doctrine”

Yet the view which has dominated our media has been the Paywall Doctrine — a notion that sports fans should be concerned because any takeover by a media company will likely signal the end of free access for fans.

It is just the sort of distracted stenography to be expected from a gallery of sporting scribes who must live on in the pitlane regardless. But it would be helpful if we could be provided also with at least some substantive and informed comment examining dispassionately all the factors at play.

It was that old misanthrope Robert Lipsyte who wrote [ SportsWorld, 1975 ] that sports writing can be a “dangerous and grotesque web of ethics and attitudes, an amorphous infrastructure that acts to contain our energies, divert our passions, and socialize us for work or war or depression” … It is a “pacifier, safety valve … a concentration camp for adolescents and an emotional Disneyland for their parents … a buffer, a DMZ, between people and the economic and political systems that direct their lives”.