Digital medium emerges as next frontier for sports viewership & advertising

India’s performance in the test series against England may be as much of a washout as the English summer, but that isn’t putting off Tom Gleeson, head of ESPN international’s digital media, which owns and runs a slew of sports related sites around the world, including India’s major portal Cricinfo. “It would have been unthinkable to have TV on mobile till a few years ago,” but now it’s happening,” he says. And like in everything else, while it’s still a poor cousin to television, digital is gaining ground as a next frontier for sports viewership.

The traditional view that sports is best seen live, is quickly giving way all over the world to being seen and tracked online, and on mobile. Live in a country where your game of choise isn’t available 24/7? Your favourite match is in some other timezone? Sitting at your workdesk and your boss has blocked your favourite sports sites?
Take cricket for instance. Though India still remains its largest audience, the US, UK, and Australia are next in line.

The interest in cricket in England, usually lukewarm, is rising in direct correlation to the winning performance of its home team. “Online is the first medium of choice in countries like US and Canada,” says Andrew Hall, head of content. Ditto for football in India. While it isn’t still the national obsession that cricket is, Gleeson says ESPN’s global sites like Soccernet and F1 attract increasing viewers from India. “There’s a huge market there, lots of young people are interested.”

Like every other form of entertainment, digital content is able to target a fragmented fan base in markets where it wouldn’t be worth the while of ESPN Digital’s sister broadcasters to do.

ESPN Digital, which is owned eventually by Disney, is separate from the television joint venture with Star in India, though ESPN goes it alone in broadcast in other markets.

Advertisers are beginning to sit up and take notice of the potential of digital dividend. ESPNcricinfo’s monthly average unique visitors shot up 79% in 2011; Soccernet was up 45%, and F1 up 57%. The entire digital platform is emerging as an attractive option for advertisers who would like a slice of the sports cake, but can’t afford the stratospheric budgets of headline TV sponsors.

And that’s just online. The action is now moving to mobile. Mobile, till now a medium “where our salespeople were more in an evangelising mode”, is attracting critical advertising mass. “The world cup was the first time we saw real advertiser interest for mobile in India,” says Gleeson. For the England-India series, ESPN has tied up with Betfair, one of UK’s biggest betting chains to sponsor mobile apps.

In what is seen as counterintuitive move in a society where most digital content is paid for and subscribed, including mobile applications, ESPN has launched a free goal mobile app for football in England. “The model is to make the application freely available – and attract advertising on the numbers.” This is something that veteran content producers in developed markets are still not confident of doing.

In India though, Gleeson says, the mobile story is slightly different. Indian users have leapfrogged from television to mobile without spending much time online, but “the challenge is different. It’s easy to do fancy advertising and content apps for smartphones. The challenge in India is -- how do you generate content for use on basic WAP enabled phones -- that will work on low-end handsets, and still look attractive,” Gleeson says.