Andrew Georgiou, — President of Eurosport, a pan-European television sports network, has said that Discovery+ will acquire sport rights that are exclusive to the platform.
Georgiou’s statement means that the OTT service will provide sport coverage that linear broadcaster Eurosport does not.
Speaking at the Broadcast Sport Virtual Breakfast Club on Wednesday, the Eurosport president clarified that Discovery believed streaming audiences will have different needs to linear.
“We’ve been thinking about a rights strategy that is a little bit differentiated from the rights strategy that we have for Eurosport. If I think of Eurosport as being a linear channel, and the things that make a linear channel work, the things that are important to our affiliate partners, the things that bring people on to a pay-TV platform for a 12 or 24-month subscription, they are a little bit different to the kind of content and rights you want to invest in for a digital first content platform,” Georgiou said.
“So, it’s a little bit different for the Discovery+ strategy. For us, it will probably be a much more market-by-market approach, whereas for Eurosport we’ve always thought pan-European. I think for Discovery+ we’ll be thinking much more bespoke on a market-by-market basis,” he added.
“We’ll slowly transition those users onto the Discovery+ platform and make sure that they get the benefit of the entire portfolio of what we’ve got on Discovery+ in addition to what they’ve come on board for – which is the sport content,” he further explained.