The internet has long been a significant outlet for sports content; Screen Digest’s first major report on the subject, Sports on the Internet, was published back in 2000. From sports news to live betting and ticket sales, the immediacy and real-time interaction offered by online connectivity has attracted sports content owners and service providers since the early days of the internet. Since then, the explosion in high-speed consumer connections has meant that, for the first time, the internet has become a fully–fledged method of delivering not just sports information and ancillary services, but direct coverage of sport itself, thus beginning to challenge existing broadcast distribution channels as a viable means of content distribution.

This report begins by looking at some of the factors in the growth of online sports video (OSV) in the USA, UK, France and Germany such as the proliferation of consumer broadband connections and online video. The report also provides an introduction to sports media rights which is crucial to understanding the development of the OSV market. The second half of the report explores the business models being developed, providing usage trends data and forecasts as well as case studies on leading OSV service providers and rights holders.

Key findings:

• As online sports service providers and rights holders increasingly seek to tap into free web video traffic, the lion’s share of revenue from sports video on the internet is likely to come from advertising.
• OSV will drive the consumption of online TV in major markets in much the same way premium sports was responsible for driving pay-TV subscriptions.
• Subscription business models will continue to play a significant role in online sports video. Transactional business models will form a minority of overall revenues.
• The top 10 list of sports content websites in the US and UK have been increasingly proliferated by the websites of major sports leagues, although third party network websites such as ESPN.com and BBC Sports still command considerable traffic.
• The ‘democracy of distribution’ which characterizes the internet is providing an important outlet for leagues and clubs to exploit their rights directly.
• With primary sports rights holders able to directly distribute their content over their own websites, third party sports networks/aggregators and broadcasters ( the traditional rights buyers) will have to pay ever-rising prices to secure online and new media rights.
• The importance and value of online rights is changing and in most cases while internet distribution continues to play second fiddle to more traditional TV models, internet rights are becoming increasingly valuable.

• Forecasts of broadband connections, online TV downloads and streams, user-generated online video streams, online TV downloads and streams, User-generated online video streams growth to 2012.
• An introduction to sports media rights including English Premier League rights An introduction to OSV Technology and Infrastructure.
• The OSV market in numbers including forecasts and analysis on website traffic and video usage, online sports video market trends and revenues, as well as the advertising, subscription, pay-per-view (PPV) and Download-to-own (DTO) models.