Pitted against heavy-hitting competition, ONE World Sports is looking to turn nimbleness into an advantage and stay ahead of the curve as media continues to evolve. On the linear front, the company is now tackling the NASL season with new series and programming and lined up October as a month to celebrate the channel’s soccer content that will include a sweepstakes for a trip to see Bayern-Munich in Germany, a free preview for Verizon FiOS and RCN subscribers, 11 matches from Oct. 10-11, and a live stream on OWS website for the entire weekend to preview the channel for viewers.
Meanwhile, the company recently partnered with Magid for a study on cord-cutting and viewing habits, announcing results of the survey last week. Stats found that sports remained a key draw to keeping consumers plugged in. Among consumers who have cut the pay-TV cord within last 2 years but who expressed an interest in returning to pay-TV, two out of five (39%) says sports channels are a reason to return. Nearly two out of five (37%) of all sports fans say they watch sports streamed online often, while nearly three in five (57%) fans say they watch sports online in any way at all with Millenials (adults 18-34) making up the majority (52%) of cord cutters over the past two years.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with Alexander “Sandy” Brown, President and CEO of ONE World Sports, about the future of television and where ONE World Sports fits into the picture.
Brown on the state of the channel: In spite of all the turmoil in this space, I think we are on a solid trajectory and our content has worked very well for us. This summer, we carried a lot of cricket, we have added a lot of content around the NASL and the distribution business is starting to pick up. Things are looking very bright.
On the Magid study: The study has provided some hardcore data that supports the value proposition for us. It is very important for us to convey to demonstrate a value proposition. With the Magid study, we cut a pretty wide swath with over 2800 respondents and took their actual subs, and then did a separate study with only broadband subscribers. I think they key takeaways for us were obviously that Millennials were a very big strong suit for us, basically 75% of all males 18-34 were either likely or more than likely to want One World Sports. We over-indexed among females, African-Americans and among Hispanics. So those are all really important points of validation for us. We look at this and we see all the cord-cutting that is out there and roughly 40% of those who have been away for the last two years said that sports is a reason to return.
On growing the brand: Soccer has been a big part of our content play. We obviously have some big brand names in Chelsea, Arsenal and Bayern-Munich, they are basically three and a half million Arsenal and Chelsea fans in this country. In the NASL, with the New York Cosmos and the content we are developing around them, that will be a big plus. The soccer part of it has been very strong. This summer we carried a lot of hours of cricket, and that seasonality is very important for us so we don’t have any dead air at any time during the course of the year.
On the road ahead: We like where we are in terms of the lineup that we’ve got. There are other areas that we may delve into. Rugby is one area that is a possibility, we’ll probably be looking at more content that’s south of the border. The original content that we put to air right now is around the NY Cosmos and the NASL. We’ve been promoting the documentary around the Cuba trip that we did in June with the Cosmos and that will be announced probably in November. Original content is something that we have been very judicious about spending a lot of money on at this point until we are at a point where we have the right distribution to be able to support it from the advertising perspective. But I would expect you would see more original content both from the studio perspective as well as for digital where we are creating content specifically for different devices and I would also say that we will probably expand our rights portfolio as we go forward.
