The business of sport may be the impetus to boost your profit-making abilities

By Kenneth Cortsen on November 1, 2013 in Sport Economy, Sport Management, Sport Marketing

“Just as the Internet provided the communications architecture enabling the disruption and reorganization of the global musical economy, the ‘media sport content economy’ is undergoing a parallel transformation” (Hutchins & Rowe, 2010, p. 4).

As you can interpret from the citation above, the ‘media sport content economy’ is changing and that brings change for corporations. British telecommunications provider BT is one example of a company, which has applied sport as a vehicle to drive profits. Sport is powerful in many ways and BT’s current situation reflects one picture while history has proved other settings where sport has been utilized to create a turnaround for ‘burning platforms’. In BT’s case, the climb of BT Sport has contributed positively to BT’s recent high second quarter results thanks to a noticeable enhancement of its broadband unit expansion.

Photo: BT Sport‘s official web site, a corporation striving to push its business in the right direction.

Globalization and technological development are factors with a huge impact on sports consumption. BT Sport has a wholesale contract with Virgin Media and partly as a result of that deal and the demand for sport in general; BT Sport has succeeded in signing up a large share of the British market so that its services are available to approximately 4 million homes.

This case mirrors the vitality of sport from a societal as well as from a business economic perspective. BT’s strategy to invest intensively in rights to portray popular sport assets, e.g. football from the English Premier League, and to integrate this in its overall marketing activities seems to pay off in the future. BT’s rival Sky has also thrown money after its digital and pay TV platforms, which acts as another sign that sport is a key element capable of adding meaning and profits to a corporation’s existence.

Sources:

BT Sport‘s official YouTube channel.

Hutchins, B., & Rowe, D. (2010). Reconfiguring Media Sport for the Online World: An Inquiry Into” Sports News and Digital Media”. International Journal of Communication, 4, 23.