Earlier this year, DraftKings CRO Matt Kalish kicked around the idea of the company streaming live games on its platform, mainly because they believe people don’t want to subscribe to multiple services to watch multiple sports and want to do everything at one site.
Now, DraftKings seems to have their sights set higher than just being a one stop streaming stop. Daniel Roberts of Yahoo talked to CEO Jason Robins, who said that one of the company’s future goals was to air NFL games.
And who knows what the future holds, right? Amazon is showing 10 NFL games this season. Maybe, in a decade, DraftKings ends up showing NFL games?
Totally. That’s actually what we want to do. That’s hopefully where we’ll get to. That’s the goal. I think we have the customer, we have the wallet, we have a lot of the ingredients to make that a success.
I don’t think this is rocket science: I think media and betting will converge. There are so many synergies. The natural market forces should make media and sports betting converge. There are other blocking factors that could get in the way, but if you just left it up to market forces, that is what would happen.
You know what?
This isn’t completely insane.
Sure, DraftKings would have to lay out a shitload of money for the right to air NFL games (even if they’re just paying for streaming rights, rather than an exclusive package). For context, Amazon is paying around $65 million just this year for the Thursday Night Football streaming package. That’s a lot of money to air just one game a week, and it probably wouldn’t help DraftKings at all on Sundays, when people want to focus on all the games at once.
Actually, after thinking about it, something does make sense here for DraftKings – NFL Sunday Ticket.
Think about it – the Sunday Ticket package on DirecTV is becoming something of a burden for the company and is losing relevance. The NFL might be opting out of their DirecTV contract next year and could take it to the open market. Imagine how perfect Sunday Ticket could be integrated online with DraftKings – video links next to your lineup for each player’s game. A mosaic screen with all of your players’ games included. Alerts and highlights when your players score points. It would be absolutely perfect for the daily fantasy fanatic.
Of course, the money is the big sticking point – DirecTV reportedly ponied up $1.5 billion a year for the Sunday Ticket rights in 2014. Does DraftKings really have *that much* cash sitting around to pay the NFL?
Probably not (at least right now), which would probably take Sunday Ticket off the table and force DraftKings to look at an option like NFL RedZone, which would probably be cheaper, though less customizable.
At any rate, in less than a year, the prospect of DraftKings streaming sports seems a bit less farfetched to me, and actually makes sense for most parties involved.
[Yahoo]
