After serving up a heavy dose of major international soccer since launching in 2012, beIN Sports hits a new stage in its strategy shift this week with the launch of college sports coverage through its recent deal with Conference USA, which will now feature college football, men’s and women’s basketball and soccer, baseball, softball and volleyball. Saturday will see the company kick off the programming with New Mexico State/UTEP at 8p, with a 30-minute pre-game show, half-time show, and post-game show hosted by Jeremy St. Louis, who joins Donovan McNabb, O.J. McDuffie, and Ki-Jana Carter in the Miami studio. Microphone duties for the game will be handled by Matt Martucci, Brett Romberg, and Jordan Daigle.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with beIN’s Deputy Managing Director Antonio Briceno about the new addition to the family and its role in shaping its platforms in the years ahead.
Briceno on the evolution of beIN Sports: The addition of new sports to our lineup marks a new change in our strategy. We were born out of international sports, going after the best leagues out there, but this is an extremely competitive market and most of the premium content was mostly related to soccer, which is still not one of the top three sports in this country for the US audience, even though it continues to grow. The reality was that we needed to expand our presence in the English general market and we decided that we didn’t want to be perceived as an international network anymore.
On the addition of Conference USA to the mix: We started looking at the whole change of strategy late last year but deals for leagues in this country are often constructed to run for a long period of time. So we took a look at what was available and felt that college sports stood out as an area where some of the conferences were in deals that precluded them from having the exposure that they deserved. We felt that there was an audience out there for these schools who may not be in a top five conference.
On new sponsor opportunities: So far we have seen six sponsors come in to partner with us on college sports and we are in talks with 16 new advertisers that we previously were not in touch with. The other fact here is that one of the issues we have with soccer, no matter how good the audience may be, is that the inventory is extremely limited with six commercial breaks per game. Now that we are getting into football, this opens tremendous up tremendous opportunities because we go from six to 19 commercial breaks so the inventory is almost triple.
On mulling eSports: As part of the new strategy that we are planning for the next five years, we are very much looking to bring in more millennials. eSports and other type of short, entertaining content are very much of interest to us. We are looking into eSports, although we haven’t made any decisions so far.
