M7 Group: Investing in sports content is becoming “more and more challenging”, says chief

Investing in sports content is becoming “more and more challenging”, reveals M7 Group’s vice president for business development, Bill Wijdeveld.

The chief pointed to a general challenge to invest in all content, but most particularly sports. However, he explained with the increasing challenges of navigating the overcrowded sport rights market, creates opportunities for partnerships for the company.

Bill Wijdeveld

“Our benefits compared to the streamers is that we used to having a solid base of breaking patterns and we have the scale of operating in different markets,” Wijdeveld said.” We have Canal+ who has been acquiring sports rights for many years for their existing market. So we are able to build upon their depth of knowledge and expertise to grow in that area. “

M7 Group’s parent company Canal+ Luxembourg acquired the rights to all 380 matches of the English Premier League for its sport channel Canal+ Sport last year. The newly created channel Canal+ Sport is available via the M7-owned Skylink and freeSAT satellite TV platforms, as well as via the Skylink Live TV application, which provides coverage to all live matches.

The M7 Group chief urges that pay TV is still the way forward especially for its smaller markets outside of Germany such as Czech Slovakia, Romania, and Slovakia

He highlighted “People using satellite seems like old fashioned, but is still a big thing and we see with linear TV, as well as, pay TV it still has a very solid base.”

But, with the growing presence of SVODS and FAST channels in the market it has caused the company to further “develop” and “innovate”, according to Wijdeveld.

“It’s the reason why we have extended expanded our proposition by adding the SVODS  and the premium elements to give you an overall better proposition  for the subscribers and helps to maintain and hopefully grow subscriber base”

He added, “Streaming properties for us is simply something on top of our existing offering.”