Podcast: Sky Sports chief on streamer competition, rights deals, "missing the mark" with Halo, record viewership, and more

Sky Sports chief sports officer Jonathan Licht speaks to the Broadcast Sport Podcast in its latest episode, opining on a wide range of subjects across the sport broadcast industry. 

The Broadcast Sport Podcast is available on all major podcast platforms, and you can also listen to it below. 

In a time when global streamers and video platforms such as YouTube are providing stern competition for linear TV, Licht struck a confident tone, believing that sport is still best served by its existing relationships with traditional broadcasters. “I think sports bodies and leagues will continue to want to have the model that exists today until something can be very clearly proven otherwise, and, as yet, I don’t really think that that’s come to the fore,” he said. 

He also believes that outside of the US, fragmented rights and deals with large streamers may not be the win that some paint them as. On how the NFL is shown by multiple broadcasters in the US, he noted, “I think that can work for a sport like the NFL in the US because the market’s so big, and it’s so dominant.

“Some people think that you could transpose that to lots of other parts of the world and lots of other rights and I’m not sure rights holders feel the same way.”

Similarly, he said, “A global streamer, yes, can give you a geographical scale, but can they really unlock the market?” pointing at times in the coversation to how Sky Sports has helped the likes of darts and others to grow their audiences. 

However, Sky Sports has still had to evolve, with the launch of streaming destination Sky Sports+ in 2024 an “unlock” in rights deals with the likes of the EFL and ATP, Licht revealed. “It starts a whole different set of conversations that you can have with rights holders,” he said, and in the case of the EFL, “Without the streaming possibility, we wouldn’t have been able to come to the commercial outcome that we did.”

Elsewhere, Licht revealed that the week crossing from December to January saw almost 500 million views across Sky Sports’ social channels, but admitted that with its short-lived Halo TikTok channel that was criticised for its tone towards female fans, “missed the mark.” He added, the important thing for us is to quickly listen to the feedback. What do we learn? What could we have done differently?

“What it absolutely doesn’t do is it doesn’t mean we don’t keep pushing forward.”

With women’s sport, this means more work on turning fans of tournaments such as the recent European Championships into week-in, week-out followers of leagues like the WSL. For the latter, Licht said, “We did see a big jump up in audiences through the first couple of years of the cycle. Then there was a little bit of a tapering off,” but after the recent rights deal with more games being shown, “total audiences for WSL are up around about 25% this year, partly driven by the increase in volume. But we are seeing good audiences for the big games.”

Licht spoke more on these topics and also touched on other areas such as the use of AI in Sky Sports productions, “We don’t see huge role for it in the sort of short to mid term,” and Sky’s relationships with free-to-air broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4, in a wide ranging interview. You can hear it in full below and subscribe on all major podcsat platforms to the Broadcast Sport Podcast for further episodes.