Magid: Return of Live Sports will Increase Value of RSNs to Pay TV Bundle
Story Highlights
With major professional team sports set to return to the national stage later this month the big question is how will fans react? Will sports maintain its major role in holding up the value of the pay TV bundle? What sports are they most looking forward to returning? Andrew Hare, SVP, Digital Research and Strategy, of Magid, shares some insights with SVG during this informative 20-minute presentation.
Watch SVG’s Ken Kerschbaumer’s interview with Hare by clicking here.
“As an industry, we’ve long held the belief that live sports and news have had primacy among all programming options and continue to be key drivers in the willingness to pay for television. The accuracy of this can be seen more starkly now because of the live sports vacuum due to the coronavirus outbreak,” says Brent Magid, President & CEO, Magid (for a PDF overview click here).
While a prior Magid study found that a wide variety of behaviors and media consumption patterns had shifted toward higher usage during COVID-19, new data finds that much of that is likely short lived as sports teams resume game play. Consumers anticipate their usage of streaming, social media, video games and other activities will return to more normal levels when live sports come back.
“We’ve seen in this study and others we’ve conducted during the pandemic that the value proposition of pay television is being eroded, particularly in comparison to streaming services. Live TV sports is clearly the leading unique selling proposition for MVPDs and vMPVDs. Retaining live sports will be key to mitigating churn. And the importance of televised sports will increase as sports wagering becomes legalized across the county,” adds Magid.