Channel-Surfing Live Sports in the FAST Era: An interview with Keith Bedford, GM EMEA at Wurl

"If you're putting out medium content, you're going to get medium advertising revenue. If you're putting out high-end content, the revenue is going to go up." — Keith Bedford

On the State of Streaming podcast, we sit down with Keith Bedford, GM EMEA at Wurl, to discuss how leagues, networks, and platforms are navigating the transition of live sports onto free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST). We talk about the real hurdles of programmatic, DAZN’s expansion, and why sports brands struggle with basic discovery. Because while streaming platforms and TV manufacturers rush to recreate free ad-supported television, bringing live sports into the FAST ecosystem remains a complex puzzle.

The Rights Are Diversifying

Tim Rowe: This time last year, Wurl noted that live sports made up less than 3% of all free ad-supported streaming television viewing compared to nearly 20% of traditional (linear - broadcast and cable) television. Have we made any progress in closing that gap over the last 12 months?

Keith Bedford: Yes, there's definitely progress there. What we're seeing in the marketplace is that the traditional brands that used to sell their rights completely to the TV industry are now holding back certain rights to put live tournaments out.

I've seen two launch recently. Man City have launched a channel. They're going with lots of live and they're going to be live on match day, which is unprecedented in the UK market. They're not allowed to show actual footage because that would break the rules around the Premier League, but they are allowed to almost commentate on the game, and this is exciting, changing how soccer is being shown in the UK. The other one we've seen launch recently is UEFA on Tubi. They're going to be going with so much live content over the next year. Where they've sold Champions League rights, they won't be showing that live, but they'll have a highlights package straight after the show, along with some Under-21s and Women's Champions League games. So it's definitely growing.

Tim Rowe: Sport is this one place that we all kind of come together. How are the unit economics changing to keep pace with streaming?

Keith Bedford: An interesting case study on this is Bundesliga, which is the main German league. What they've done is they've sold their Saturday rights to Comcast, which is Sky, and that's still traditionally being shown over the weekend, but they've kept back a Friday night game for Samsung TV Plus. They still see the main platforms as their bread and butter where they're going to get most of the revenue, but they are diversifying their revenue going into something like Samsung TV Plus.

Major rights like the World Cup are going to sell those rights all day long—that's premium television. But when you start filtering that down into some of the smaller sports, they're not getting the money through rights anymore that they used to receive from the big broadcasters. So they're going to have to start creating their own not just FAST channels, but social media outlets and YouTube outlets. Everybody that owns rights or sports has to look at how they're going to get to the viewer in all different ways. FAST is just one of those elements.

If you look at some of the big shifts that are happening in streaming right now, DAZN is looking at how they can do NFL rights and local sports rights. We work with DAZN with the FIFA channel, but they are really going for it, and that's where some of these big broadcast rights are going to go into streaming.

Solving the Live Ad Puzzle

Tim Rowe: What are you seeing in terms of ad monetization for the expansion of live sports onto free streaming?

Keith Bedford: Five years ago, FAST was really a platform for entertainment companies that had a back catalog that you wanted to put out on a streaming service to see if they could earn some extra revenue. What we've seen now is some of the bigger brands are launching first-window content on FAST. A&E, AMC, and BBC all have FAST channels that are doing particularly well. When you get better content, you get better advertising money.

If I take sports as an example right now, there needs to be investment in how we do live. Right now, there's a lot of pre-sold ads in the big sponsorship games, but the programmatic angle has to grow. That's going to grow in the fact that there is technology now where we can actually put live markers in the programmatic bidstream to say, "Here's a live event. This is live right now," so that revenue can go up and the CPM for that revenue can be higher. If you're bidding on programmatic ads and you don't know it's live, you're just going to put a normal bid in.

Lucas Bertrand, CEO of Looper Insights on How Bad UI Signposting Impacts Live Sports Viewership

Tim Rowe: The workflow is really interesting and valuable to our audience in understanding why you aren't able to easily activate an ad campaign across multiple sports with the click of a button. Can you help us understand those challenges?

Keith Bedford: When you're seeing more and more live content coming in, there's a number of things that we have to do in streaming which have been done in traditional broadcast forever—namely, when does the ad break go in? We know when the game should start and finish, and we might put an ad break in the middle, but that's taking a bit of a risk because live sports overrun. So we have to look at models where we're using a human to press a button. All this technology, and we're still saying the best way to do it is somebody literally has to press the ad button.

We've created a system where we say, "This is a Bundesliga game. This is Bayern Munich with Cologne. This is soccer." We have the ability to send more metadata down into the bidstream to say, "Here's a live event, here's all the metadata." We can pre-send event IDs to say what's coming up in the next month so planners can pull it into their planning schedules. In the early days of streaming, no one even knows there's a live event coming up. If nobody knows there's a live event coming up, how can they bid more money on it?

Why Sports Channels Flop

Tim Rowe: What are the three things that you see folks get wrong? Why doesn't free ad-supported TV work, or why don't live sports on FAST always work?

Keith Bedford: The main thing is that the consumer doesn't half the time know that you've got free channels within your service. When you buy a TV, half the time you don't realize you've got all these free channels on there. The problem starts with how do these brands promote that they've got some great content on their network.

The next thing is any OS that's running on a TV has got to be easy to find. You've got to pick up the remote and find the content from the home screen straight away. It's a proven fact that if you're advertising content on the home screen, it gets higher hours of viewing. Promotion with the actual platform that you're on is key.

The third thing is I don't see many brands doing cross-marketing. If you launch a channel now, I don't think you can totally rely on just people finding it anymore. You have to be using all the different media outlets, the social media outlets—the Instagrams, the TikToks, the YouTubes.

Tim Rowe: There are clearly two tiers. There are apps and companies that understand marketing, and then there are apps and companies that completely ignore it, and there really isn't a middle ground.

Keith Bedford: Exactly. The great thing about streaming compared to traditional broadcast is there's so much more data available, and it's just about using that data effectively to get your spend on marketing and advertising back. You've got to get the home screen right so people can find the content, and you've got to cross-market. These are three very important elements, and I don't see many people getting 100% right.

Want to watch or listen to the entire conversation?

Get it here: https://podcast.stateofstreaming.com/keith-bedford-wurl-s5e6/