As the English football season draws to its climax, some people are more interested in what happens after the last kick of the season. One such person is Oliver Slipper, joint CEO of digital rights distributor Perform, which provides video streaming technology and sales support for Virgin Media’s VOD Premier League rights. Virgin’s EPL rights expire this summer, with ESPN (NYSE: DIS), BT (NYSE: BT) and BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) tipped to be in the running. That casts some doubt over one of Perform’s most prized deals — but, Slipper says, with new deals just signed in the US and Europe, Perform sees its future growth outside the UK…
— MLS deal: Perform distributes Virgin’s rights through its e-player, which is also now embedded on every major national newspaper website. Likewise, Slipper revealed to me the company has signed a deal with the US Major League Soccer tournament to be the sole digital distributor of its online rights – VOD shown freely domestically on its embeddable e-player, live matches available as global PPV through its Omnisport.tv portal. The company, which recently set up a New York office, is now pitching to publishers there to host its e-player in revenue-sharing deals. Slipper says the MLS and Perform will jointly handle the online sales and that he hopes to have some major names signed up as distribution partners by the time the next US season kicks off in Spring 2010.
— European tour: The deal comes just after Perform signed its first major content deal on mainland Europe with Spain’s Prisa, and the company is now looking to sign similar deals in countries like Germany and Italy:”The major growth for us will probably be in non-UK expansion… We see the downturn as a very good opportunity for us to expand because it’s difficult for new market entrants to come in. There’s very little VC or private equity money around and it’s hard to invest in the technology.” Slipper says Perform is also to looking to capitalise on what he says is a lack of investment in video from UK newspaper groups: “A lot of bigger media businesses that opened up digital arms very rapidly are now closing them down; everyone’s talking about focusing on the core products. Our core is digital media.”
— Video in recession “Overall, the internet video space and particularly the sports market is still very buoyant. Digital advertising hasn’t grown quite as quickly as everyone expected, but pre-roll video ads are still fast fast-growing.” Slipper admits that subscription models are “coming under more pressure” and that he declines to say how many subscribers Perform’s consumer-facing live sports and VOD site Omnisport has added since its launch in February — “It’s not tens of millions, but we are converting visitors to paying subscribers. 2009 is about getting the business model right and we’ll look to expand in the next two years”. Slipper points to the fact that “Sky and Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) subs have really held up in the downturn”.
— Piracy: A big part of Slipper’s sales pitch to rights holders is that there aren’t too many legal ways for fans to watch sport online and piracy is rife ,as the Premier League is finding to its cost. “In a world where piracy is everywhere online, us and ESPN 360 are really the only places where rights holders can get their content out there legally in a safe, secure environment.” He argues that rights holders that only make their content available “on two or three networks and not anywhere else, can’t then complain about piracy”.
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