Sports Illustrated Conditions Too Onerous For Oasys

Despite generating significant revenues from its Sports Illustrated content, mobile content aggregator Oasys Mobile didn’t renew the contract, because “Sports Illustrated raised its demands for compensation when the original deal expired…”We looked at renewing the contract, but the pricing and licensing fees were too onerous for us,” CEO Gary Ban said. “We felt like we wouldn’t get the return on investment that would be necessary.”
Previously companies vied quite strongly for the rights to branded content, but recently its begun to seem like a bad deal all round. Perhaps Oasys learned from Dijji/Dwango, which went bust with an exclusive content deal with Playboy that didn’t earn enough to cover the licensing costs. The mobile content industry has been pretty hyped for a while, and this may be inflating the expectation of content owners — or perhaps the mobile content industry simply overestimated how much it could sell of a particular product.
There’s also a strong argument that content owners would do better to avoid exclusive deals and instead get their content to as many people as possible.

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