The entry of Eleven Sports into the US television market a week ago marks the latest strategic acquisition for the growing sports media entity. Last week’s announcement that the global broadcaster picked up certain distribution assets stateside from ONE World Sports now brings the company to 50 million homes across the US, where it will according to the company “build a strong portfolio of rights in the US from sports including cycling, ice hockey, basketball, soccer, rugby, lacrosse, cricket, drone racing and other millennial-focused sports.”
With distribution in hand, Cynopsis Sports spoke with Anthony Bailey, Senior Vice President of Aser Media about the deal and what fans can expect moving forward.
Bailey on targeting the US market: We’ve been looking at the US for over a year and we had a plan to come into the market on our own. Then ONE World Sports approached us and we looked at them as a business and we decided we didn’t want to buy their business for various reasons but we would be interested in buying their distribution agreements because those were the most valuable things for what we were trying to do. Our business is different form their business and we want to make our business different from what they’ve built, but their footprint was interesting and would jumpstart what we wanted to do, which would take years and a lot of money.
On changes: We are not here to compete with ESPN or FOX. We’re not going to take them on or overspend in rights. But we are going to be a 24-hour live sports network. We are actively signing rights deals and we are going to have a lot of global rights and we are also going to have a lot US events that Millennials in this country have been watching in various forms. So you are going to end up with a channel that has a lot of live events, no debate, and one that is going to give viewers an option to watch both niche and established sports. You are going to see it programmed very differently, meaning the era of the 30-minute show is done. You may see us put 11-minute content out there, because that is what people are consuming on the digital side. If we find good content and good content providers that we want to be tied with, we will program our network around them.
On the Eleven Sports brand: Eleven Sports’ worldwide strategy has been to go out and bring big rights to underserved markets. We’ve been very successful at that. Everywhere it is on, it has brought in a good group of premium rights and quickly shot up to become one of the most-watched sports networks in those territories. We are also going to bring smaller rights to the bigger markets, meaning niche sports and not take on the big boys in a bidding war. We’ll still have some football and basketball for some of the leagues that may be underserved.
On advertising: We are selling ads on the network and we are trying to do that differently too. We are going more for sponsorship/”own a night” instead of sponsorship-specific spots and dots. You can own a sports, own a night, we’ll build content around the advertiser. We’ve also hired a third-party company called Edge Media Sales, based in NY, who will be out representing us in the market.
On esports: E is a big part of our strategy. We are looking hard at esports, we are looking at sports that do well with the college crowd such as Ultimate Frisbee, rugby and of course esports. Esports has a very dedicated following and if done right, that following could make it a big homerun. But that is definitely one of the rights we will be announcing here soon.
