Disruptions in the sports content delivery value chain due to consuming sports content over the Internet

Abstract

A major component of the highly lucrative sports business is the content delivery value chain consisting of a number of players including the content creators - sports leagues; content aggregators - TV networks; content distributors - pay TV providers; advertisers - one of the main financiers in the value chain; and consumers. The relationships between the value chain players have been both cooperative and competitive, especially when the borders separating them became less defined due to backward and forward integration efforts of players. With the advancements in Internet content delivery and electronic devices, a new form of sports content consumption has emerged that has the potential to re-define the borders between the value chain players and to disrupt the industry. This new form of sports content consumption is Sports over IP (SpoIP, sports content consumption over the Internet). This thesis lays out four different scenarios about how the SpoIP disruption could play out in the value chain. It uses information from similar disruption in other industries and system dynamics modeling to present the ramification and likelihood of each scenario. This work predicts that the consumers will be the winner of SpoIP disruption because they will have access to good quality and cheaper sports content going forward.