How Ligue 1 built its own streaming platform from scratch - and whether it's here to stay | The New Economics of Fandom Ep.3

Well, I think that's interesting because that's sort of the whole crux.

Nick, I feel like you and I talk about this at Sports Bar all the time with all of our events is this is the shift that's going on across all of sports is it's so long they've been B2B businesses.

You sell your media rights to another business.

You sell your IP licensing rights to another business.

that it does require a completely different tech stack, a completely different set of expertise.

That feels like, Nick, that's the whole crux of everything.

It feels like we talk about SportsPro, not just on this series, at our events, on our other podcasts.

That is really kind of where we're at as an industry.

Absolutely.

And I think it's one of these things that...

If Ligon had more time, that probably would have taken a different approach in terms of bringing in more different resources, maybe taking longer to find other partners to help deliver better products or different aspects of it.

Who knows? You don't need to speculate because it is speculation.

You had to do what you had to do.

But that whole challenge where we see where there's external expertise being brought in from outside the industry there's people from within the industry who've already been through a similar experience somewhere else and or in this instance where there's just people within the business that have to get together and work out the right strategy for different reasons sometimes it can be a budget reason sometimes it could be a time reason um and there can be all these other layers to it so i think this is one of these things i feel like still the industry when you compound it with what's happening in media as a transformation of consumption we're constantly in this whole um sort of moving window everything's trying to um change we're all having to constantly change our ways as we go along whether it's not just legan's example but it's right across the whole the whole ecosystem frankly so yeah must have been must have been a fun ride but i guess taking it taking it taking it further forward from what we saw in the industry uh looked like a pretty good uh you know a pretty successful launch uh what was your view how did how did it how did it compare relative to expectations and maybe what are some of the numbers that we've seen also in the media, but if there's anything else you can share.

No, um, definitely.

I think, um, uh, obviously we had like very clear objectives in terms of, um, where we needed the product to go, uh, where we needed the channel itself to go, because, uh, one of the nuances was also that league one plus was, um, not only a platform, but also a linear channel.

Um, And not only OTT, but also like with some distribution partner, with telco distribution and so on.

So this is what we call like a hyper distribution where we try to be as close as every fan in France that we could get.

And in terms of the numbers and success, like the objectives for the first year was to meet 1 million targets in terms of subscription targets.

The good thing of that is that we met this target like three weeks into the first season.

So it was like obviously also a huge stamp for us that we could show to the club's president because one of the nuances also is that we were not like a media business.

We're still like a football league.

So it means that everything that I just described and that can feel a bit scary It was even scarier for club presidents that were looking at the numbers and knowing if they can pay the wages of the players, if they can make some transfer windows and so on.

So the 1 million target was achieved pretty quickly, which gave us also some sense of, okay, this goes in the right way.

Just continue to make the service grow.