The 5 Trends Reshaping Sports Content

A simple graphic that we put out on Instagram can tell a really in-depth story, stories with statistics, stories about players, stories about where we are up to with the sporting action in the year. We were able to do an awful lot with just one image that appears in someone's Instagram feed. That was Robbie Spargo from Little Dot Studios. We could live at the Broadcast Sports Summit 2025 at the Emirates Stadium London. He presented about five trends he believes are changing sports content production and distribution, including big changes in the licensing of sports rights, the rise of YouTube and other social platforms, the influence of content creators and the future of brand partnerships in sport. You can now listen to Robbie's full presentation on this episode of the Broadcast Sport Podcast. Thanks very much everyone for sticking around to this final session of today. We're kicking off the panel with a short presentation that I'll be giving around some of the trends that we're seeing at Little Dot Sports in sports digital content and I hope there will be a good scene setter for the panel that we will have with the team on Creator-led Entertainment formats. So I'm going to go through five trends in about ten minutes and hopefully that will be a good scene setter. The first trend is one that will probably come as no surprise and we've all seen this played out in the sports industry press this year which is the generational change that is happening to right now with the licensing of sports rights. Now some of this is happening behind a paywall. Netflix is acquisition of the F1 rights in the US or sorry, Apple's acquisition of the F1 rights in the US or the Women's World Cup going on to Netflix. But the part I'm really interested in is free-to-air distribution moving increasingly to social first platforms, social first brands and even social first creators. Of course those gold bridge taking a Bundesliga rights for a Friday night alongside Gary Nobles. The overlap but also I'm probably slightly more interestingly to me, Gary Linnikas podcast taking La Liga rights and club or cup rights onto his podcast. Now what this signals is that we are moving toward a world in which these platforms are increasingly the way, single best way to reach scale audiences with free-to-air rights. This leads me on to the second trend which is why is this happening. And the reason for this is clearly because audiences are moving in that direction. Now I think this is a very eye catching graph from a off-com which shows the total viewing among 16 to 34 year olds which is traditionally the demographic that we see as heralding where the broader population is headed in terms of their consumption. And you can see YouTube is not only the dominant platform for consumption across all four screens so that is linear as well as catch up but it actually is bigger than all of the traditional UK broadcasters combined. If you look at TikTok that outstrips all of the traditional UK broadcasters as well and when you think about TikTok as a short form 30 second or so vertical video platform that constitutes a significant amount of videos that people are scrolling through to beat the viewing that they are taking place on platforms like BBC. Now this isn't a ephemeral trend, it's not a recent trend, it's something has been happening over the last decade or so. And YouTube has been making overtures to TV producers and TV style content for a very long time in a bid to win TV advertising dollars. But this year has really been a tipping point. And in our data, the data that we have on our platforms from all the YouTube channels that we run, we have seen that the reason for this is because this year for the first time consumption of YouTube on TV and now outstrips consumption on YouTube on any other device. And this is by watch time. So you can see at the start of this year that pink line there, sorry the red line is where TV consumption started to outstrip mobile consumption. And as you can also see this has been happening for a long time. So since 2023 that line has been steadily on the rise. But with this trend, with this, with the flipping of those two lines we can see that this has become entrenched. And as a result, it's the TV style content that is winning out. So if we look at, again, data from across all of the channels that little dot runs, we look at the views, average video views by content length. It is TV length content that is winning out content that is 15 to 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, or even two hours. Those are the buckets of content that are predominantly winning on the platform. This leads me then to the third trend, which is I guess the inverse of YouTube as TV. What's happening with other social platforms? The trend that we're seeing is that increasingly Instagram and TikTok are becoming effectively the front page of the internet. Again, looking at this influential 16 to 24-year-old demographic on the right-hand side, you can see that Instagram and TikTok are second and third only to YouTube and way ahead of Facebook as a consumption platform. And if you look at the graph on the left-hand side, which is all adult internet users, Instagram is starting to bridge that gap to Facebook, which is the more entrenched platform in this country. The great thing about this is that Instagram is a really mixed media and interesting platform to use. You can communicate in lots of different ways. We are able to get data on the type of content that people are consuming and being served, and we can see that photos, carousels, and reels are all on the rise, but all pretty much equally on the rise. So this is an interesting mixed media platform, and that doesn't even account for stories data. But also interestingly, it's the type of content in that media that is varied. So we're not just seeing regurgitations of a match or sporting action being in the content that's cutting through. We're seeing editorial content that is telling sporting narratives or personality-led content, informative content that is the type of content that's cutting through and that people are actually consuming and being served. And here are a few examples of how we're able to do that just with graphics. So a simple graphic that we put out on Instagram can tell a really in-depth story. Stories about with statistics, stories about players, stories about where we are up to with the sporting action in the year. We're able to do an awful lot with just one image that appears on someone's Instagram feed. So if YouTube is TV and social is a key kind of marketing channel to tell stories and narratives, then what's so different about this world today? Well, we think there is one thing that is disrupting the industry more than anything else and changing the shape of the content that is being distributed on these platforms, and that is creators. Creators are changing the face not just of sports content but of content more generally. We live in a world in which Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson achieves almost as much viewership as the Super Bowl. This is a really significant trend and as a result, this type of content is starting to change the way that more traditional TV and sports content is being created or needs to be created. And the reason that I think that is and I think we'll get into this on the panel in a second is that this type of content is more personal and more intimate than ever before. If we look at something like Mark Golbridge, he reads the comments out as he is streaming, as he is watching a game, and he integrates those comments into his broadcast, and that might be just the talking points, but it might even be advice on how he produces his piece of content. He integrates that in real time into the content. People have a one-to-one connection with Mark Golbridge that resembles something more like radio than it does television. Now inherently and instinctively, we think that athletes are probably best placed to capitalise that when it comes to traditional sports, stakeholders, and many of them are, so look at Alicia Laman or Ilona Mar on Instagram and the colossal followings that they've been able to grow, Lando Norris and George Russell and what they've been able to do across YouTube or Bryson to Sean Bowers, probably one of the standout examples of an athlete turning into a creator, we're able to see that they actually are capitalising. And some of them are starting to encroach on more traditional media brand space by streaming live sports rights. The Cristiano Ronaldo example of him streaming Premier Paddle is slightly odd, in my opinion, but it's still an example of a creator taking sports rights and distributing it to a channel that they've been able to create. Something actually that Tom daily did about eight years ago when he took the diving championship rights and distributed it on his YouTube channel. So what can sports rights holders and traditional sports media brands learn from this? Well, I think it is that intimacy that we need to prioritise. We need to make sure that that is coming across in all of the content that's being created. And there's two great examples here, one on the left from Tottenham Hotspur, who do a fantastic job on TikTok of showing that intimacy of being able to create bonds between players and fans through TikTok content and through an inherently personal connection that they create there. And one on the right, or WSL, that we created where we got two players and helped to bring out their personalities and showcase that to the audience to create a connection between them and fans. So where does this all lead for sports rights holders? Now I think the value of it traditionally has really been the reach that it's been able to drive. And I think even something like the Bundesliga distributing their rights on Mark Goldbridge's channel is a play for reach rather than revenue. But we think that that balance has to shift. We think that probably we are at a point now where the growth in reach is starting to plateau. Somewhat this table shows the data of follower acquisition year-on-year for the top tier rights holders. And there's only one that's been able to grow year-on-year and that's formula one. So perhaps there's a plateauing or a saturation point that we're reaching in terms of that reach that is achievable through social media. And so perhaps now it's time to seek that monetisation, seek that rebalance towards revenue and make this question about distributing through social more a question of can we actually make money through this as well as can we reach new audiences or reach scale audiences with it. We think that commercial partnerships are still massively undervalued and under-exploited in the social and digital space. I use this F1 example actually is a good example rather than a bad one. But generally speaking brand of content is still bundled into commercial partnerships as a value add or as an afterthought and is still relatively ill-defined. But there is a huge opportunity here to tell really interesting stories that deliver brand marketing, communications objectives as well as service audiences of the rights holders. We also know that digital is really good at delivering targeted and measurable audiences and again that is something that's not often being factored in, valued or costed into the commercial content packages. And if rights holders don't do it, I think brands will start to do it directly. They're expecting more. This is a great example of where Rolex have used their Ambassador Carlos Alcarez to tell a ten minute long story that did 11 million views and got 240 comments. So some of those views will have been paid to 240 comments in the case of this, been genuinely engaging for audiences. They're doing this directly because they don't feel that they can do it through other traditional channels. And what's indicative of this trend is that something that we see firsthand is that generally sports social inventory is underutilised by sports rights holders. We represent a large number of different YouTube channels. We have the right to be able to sell the advertising space in front of those YouTube channels. Now for me, it feels like an absolute no-brainer that a brand who previously would have activated their sponsorship by buying TV space or out of home around a stadium, don't buy the pre-roll in front of the highlights of the competition or the team that they're sponsoring. This feels like an indicator really of how underutilised and undervalued social media inventory is. And it's not just limited to pre-roll. This includes collaborations, posts, media retargeting campaigns, audience lists from social platforms, all of which are vastly underutilised. And I think this really is the next frontier in terms of sports, digital content and the next phase of evolution for it as it grows into maturity. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Broadcastsport podcast. Please like and subscribe, and we'll see you on the next one. We'll be adding more sessions from the Broadcastsport Summit to this podcast series over the coming weeks. See you then.