WarnerMedia: Sports rights tenders provide transparency and competitiveness to the process

Sports rights tenders is a trend according to the panelists at “The new sports rights scenario in the era of streaming and D2C”, one of the talks that took place at the first day of NEXTV Sports Latin America Dataxis series.

“The tenders are welcome in order to make possible everyone’s participation. The tender gives transparency, competitiveness, to manage rights,” said Gustavo Minaker, head of Sports for LatAm and general manager for Chile of WarnerMedia Latin America.

Matías Rivera, founder and CEO of Fanatiz, commented that the sports rights sector is “in a profound and entertaining process of transformation. From Fanatiz we have seen a diversity of opportunity spaces to create value and benefit for our clients”, he said. In consequence, the company has several business units: Fz Sports, which is the mother company; Fanatiz the OTT, Nunchee to offer OTT white label technology, and 1190 Sports, to manage sports rights in an integral way: commercial rights, bets, among others, “not only audiovisual rights.”

For Rivera the good design of the tenders is important to ensure the value and availability of tournaments for fans. He indicated that in the large tenders, much of the second or third tier content is not programmed, it is not made available and “we all lose”. Minaker agreed: “We can’t buy the rights to shelve them. I believe that each company has a special space. There is room for everyone with different models and it is necessary to think about the final consumer.”

Arnault Lannuzel, VP of Sales for Latin America and Southern Europe at Broadpeak, pointed out that from a technology point of view the three great challenges for sports broadcasts are latency, buffering and rebuffering. He mentioned that in Italy an agreement was reached between DAZN and Telecom Italia to broadcast a sporting event through OTT multicast technology, eliminating buffering and the 40-second latency, as well as reducing distribution costs. “We only got an error number of 0.02% thanks to the cooperation of the content and the network provider.”