Why Tech Companies Keep Buying Sports Rights No-One Cares About

Jan Dawson on August 28, 2017

Reading Time: 4 minutes

This past week saw both Twitter and Facebook sign deals with recently-launched sports network Stadium for live coverage of various college sports. Both companies had earlier signed TV streaming deals for a number of other bits and pieces of sports content, none of them particularly compelling. In a world where sports content is one of the few slices of live TV still holding up reasonably well as viewing shifts to on-demand and streaming, why aren’t these companies buying more interesting stuff? The answer lies largely in the long-term deals signed by the major sports leagues in the US.

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Jan Dawson

Jan Dawson is Founder and Chief Analyst at Jackdaw Research, a technology research and consulting firm focused on consumer technology. During his sixteen years as a technology analyst, Jan has covered everything from DSL to LTE, and from policy and regulation to smartphones and tablets. As such, he brings a unique perspective to the consumer technology space, pulling together insights on communications and content services, device hardware and software, and online services to provide big-picture market analysis and strategic advice to his clients. Jan has worked with many of the world’s largest operators, device and infrastructure vendors, online service providers and others to shape their strategies and help them understand the market. Prior to founding Jackdaw, Jan worked at Ovum for a number of years, most recently as Chief Telecoms Analyst, responsible for Ovum’s telecoms research agenda globally.