Re-imagining the media rights landscape: Can short-form content rejuvenate revenues?

Traditionally, live sport has driven nearly all of the value in any media rights agreement. The appointment-to-view and ‘lean-in’ nature of premium sports content has helped broadcasters maximise viewership – recently exemplified by Rory McIlroy’s dramatic Masters victory in April 2025, which helped deliver the most-watched day in Sky Sports’ history, with a peak audience of 1.85m in the UK, reminding us of the enduring effect of live sporting drama.

However, beyond these increasingly scarce, ‘Did you see it?’ moments, largely reserved to the most high-profile sporting events, recent years have seen a softening of engagement with the long tail of live sport.

The rise of short-form content

There has been a clear step-change in live sports media rights values. Deloitte analysis has identified that from 2014 to 2019 the global value of media rights grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.1%. Excluding the impact of COVID-19 during 2020, Deloitte estimates this growth rate will slow considerably to 2.7% from 2021 through to 2027.

Evidently, fewer people are watching a wider variety of live sporting events – and the knock-on impact for many sports organisations is clear to see. At the same time, short-form viewership has exploded across various platforms, none more so than YouTube, where viewing of sports content grew by 45% in 2024, totalling 35 billion hours of sports content watched on the platform – most of which has been on-demand content.

The communal nature of live sport – alongside traditional media rights cycles, rightsholder risk aversion and established commercial structures – mean that live sport is not going away any time soon. However, if short-form viewership of sport continues to grow, we could begin to see changes in how rights agreements are constructed, and how value is exchanged.

Successful rightsholders will be those that take a holistic approach to the sale of media rights, and take time to properly understand the increasing value that non-live rights provide to broadcast partners: Do they simply drive incremental viewership and advertising revenues? And/or are they increasingly acting as a ‘cheaper’ top-of-the-funnel marketing tool to push viewers into a broadcaster’s wider ecosystem and provide meaningful revenue through third-party platforms like YouTube?

Balancing short-term and long-term interests

Rightsholders need to have a clear vision and purpose to balance both their short-term commercial interests and long-term growth objectives. Establishing a clear strategy in terms of VOD content on owned-and-operated platforms, prior to engaging with broadcaster partners, is paramount.

Several leading US sports have been able to strike this balance, successfully accessing the next generation of potential fans by meeting them on their native platforms, using their favoured content formats – without sacrificing distribution revenues from their traditional broadcast partners.

Clearly, the leading American sports leagues have the benefit of a premium product in a large addressable market, but their more egalitarian structure – as opposed to the European football model – allows more centralised, collective decision-making around their content distribution strategy. Football clubs outside of the US model may need to start creating their own collective – acting as one to ensure they can drive the best outcomes at both a central and individual level.

For a rightsholder, this approach begins by fully understanding the intellectual property (IP) that they own, the relative interest in each type of asset under their control, and the various distribution methods by which to reach target audiences. Each single type of content – live and non-live – has to be assessed, valued and then have a clear growth strategy built around it.

Taking this approach, we may see organisations who are able to reignite media rights revenue growth primarily through their VOD assets – both via sub-licensing new packages to partners and through their own platforms. Furthermore, by developing more engaging shorter-form content to appeal to younger fans, those audiences may then be attracted back towards the longer-form live experience as they age and have more spending power and control.

The opportunity may exist most for those rightsholders who identify themselves as the ‘Squeezed Middle’, and non-premium – as opposed to those select properties that generate the greatest media rights revenues. In many ways they may have the first-mover advantage of being unencumbered by long-term, exclusive agreements – hence the ability to be agile, creative and test-and-learn when it comes to new commercial models.

Content format trends

A recent update by WSC Sports, the AI-powered sports content platform who work with several leading sports organisations, indicated that the average length of videos created on their platforms has decreased by 24% over a year. In addition, for the first time, vertical videos – those created to target users of the likes of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat platforms – made up the majority of the videos they created.

Understanding these types of trends is directly relevant for rightsholders looking to maximise the value of their rights portfolio, and necessitates a couple of key questions:

• Could they better package and sell and/or retain clip rights based on exact length, format and platform usage?
• Can they and their media partners better collectively benefit from sharing or dividing up these rights – rather than feel they are competing for the same fan/customer? 

The current media landscape – with shifting audience habits, plateauing media revenues and challenging socio-economic factors – means that no value can be left on the table, under-used or given no clear objective as to its purpose. The next generation of successful rightsholders will recognise this and be best able to future-proof their property in the long-term.