(23 February 2008 6:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Online Sports Video (OSV) will drive the consumption of online TV in major markets globally in much the same way as premium sports content was responsible for driving pay-TV subscriptions.

As online sports service providers and rights holders increasingly seek to tap into free web video traffic, the lion’s share of revenue from sports video on the internet is likely to come from advertising.

Online Sports Video: Rights, Revenues and Forecasts, a report published by Screen Digest, predicts that the number of sports video streams/downloads served in the US and UK markets will more than double - from 5.2 billion last year to 10.8 billion by 2012 in the US and from 398 million to 1.2 billion in the UK.

Subscription business models will continue to play a significant role in online sports video. Transactional business models will form a minority of overall revenues. The top-10 list of sports content websites in the US and UK have been increasingly proliferated by the websites of major sports leagues, although third-party network websites such as ESPN.com and BBC Sports still command considerable traffic

The "democracy of distribution," which characterises the internet, is providing an important outlet for leagues and clubs to exploit their rights directly. With primary sports rights holders able to directly distribute their content over their own websites, third-party sports networks/aggregators and broadcasters (the traditional rights buyers) will have to pay ever-rising prices to secure online and new media rights.

The importance and value of online rights is changing, and in most cases while internet distribution continues to play second fiddle to more traditional TV models, internet rights are becoming increasingly valuable.