Playfly’s CEO explains why leagues are looking to consolidate local sports rights

Sloan noted the continued strong ad marketplace for sports, which formed the single strongest line of content to be sold in this year’s upfront marketplace. He said he also expects streaming to continue to increase its share of sports viewership as linear TV sees its share erode further. 

The bankruptcy of Main Street Sports Group (MSSG) earlier this year forced 20 NBA and NHL teams to change their TV and streaming partners, and eight more changed their streaming home. Throughout, Playfly kept 100% of its rights and is selling local media for all 83 of its teams this season, landing local ad sales deals with several media channels, including TV station groups Sinclair, Scripps, Gray and Nexstar, along with sports streamer DAZN. 

Sloan spoke with Digiday about the health of the marketplace and the impact of streaming on viewership and ad sales. 

The following Q&A has been lightly edited for space and clarity. 

Streaming seems to be the biggest change in sports viewership.

It’s been a slow progression of how people have started engaging. The amount of people that are now watching through streaming for our local games across the country is not insignificant. It is in the mid to high teen [percentages] of total audience for any particular game, and we see a path in the not too distant future where over a third of the audience will come in through streaming. The remainder will be on traditional linear TV. That is all predicated on the idea that traditional linear TV looks the same in three to five years from now, which I would not be betting on. 

The leagues [NHL, NBA and MLB] are more interested than ever before about consolidating their local rights into a centralized platform. Whether that happens or not — whether the teams will want that or whether fans will have a say in that or not — remains to be seen. It’s all being discussed at the present.

Can you elaborate on those discussions?

We have been in discussions with each one of the leagues individually about that potential and what they’re thinking that might be best to happen there. So no firm decisions. The NBA probably is the first decision because they’ve been talking about doing this in a consolidated platform potentially as soon as the 27-28 season, meaning next season. 

The NBA is thinking about creating a platform with potentially one of the streaming partners to consolidate all 30 teams into one platform for their local games. So you would still only get your local game, but you’d go into one environment and you’d pick up your Knicks or whoever. The league hasn’t thought that they would have every team in the product, but they’re still figuring that out. 

In some cases the local rights holder doesn’t want to give that up, right? 

If they can get the majority of the teams to opt in, they can go to market with something that a that a very much a streamer would likely bid on, and then they can add other teams in if teams want to eventually opt in. 

The teams might push back and say we want to keep it the way that it is, and they might win. The league might say we’re going to give up on the opportunity. But I think they’re clearly going down a path of exploring this potential option. Because everybody’s end goal is to create an environment where the fans know where the games are, it’s widely distributed so everyone has access to it, and engagement levels remain high, so that the the sport continues to grow.

So where does that leave Playfly? 

We’ve kept the marketplace — advertisers and agencies — focused in on the importance of this space, and to not get caught up in the soap opera and the drama of where are they going to go? At the end of the day, the games will always be on. We’ve been able to still transact in the upfront process, [as well as] scatter, doing sponsorship level deals, [and] highly integrated partnerships — and nothing’s been disrupted thankfully. So we have not had a degradation of our narrative and/or our results.

We are sitting here on a weighted average because we have every team, so some winners, some losers. Every year, like an annuity, we get to bring out a similar, if not improved, supply. One of the calling cards for us in the marketplace is although the media rights holder might change, the fans are going to show up no matter what.

How’s the sports marketplace after sports’ central positioning in the upfront? 

In general it’s been an okay marketplace, heavily predicated in the sports world — and probably overall —on football spending: NFL first, college football second, and then everything else in sports has fallen behind that. 

The scatter marketplace never materialized … In today’s environment, you have to still count quite a bit on a healthy upfront to do well in a in a calendar year. From that perspective, we would still like to see more of a return to scatter. There were certain brands this year that decided to sit out the upfront and said that they just like the optionality of coming in in scatter, and that’s just starting to materialize.

What new categories are you seeing come into the local sports market? 

AI certainly is, and we’ve got now this prediction marketplace. Sports betting is sort of settling in, but dependent upon what the leagues will continue to allow in their rulings for for what we can sell, that could be a very healthy category for us between Polymarket, Kalshi and others. Tourism and travel are back on the upswing as are financial services which are up significantly. 

What sport is poised to grow? 

Women’s volleyball is going to explode.