Although it seems like a new player in the sports streaming panorama, the truth is that OneFootball, the streaming platform based in Germany and founded in 2008, has been making great broadcast alliances with major European sports players: in 2019 it partnered up with Eleven Sports to have the rights to stream directly on their app of La Liga in UK and with Sky to transmit 2. Bundesliga and DFB-Pokal matches in Germany. But it was not until 2020 that they took a big step by acquiring Dugout, a club-founded video forum, which had more specialization in social media, and with it the broadcasting rights of European clubs such as Real Madrid, PSG, Barca, Juventus, Chelsea or Bayern.
One of the particularities of OneFootball is the close relationship it achieves between sports broadcasts / clubs and their followers, being another example of a certain rupture of the traditional sports press model, generating not only a follow-up of current events, through a third party that complement the club’s own social networks and distribution channels.
Yannick Ramcke, head of OTT, led a recent conference where he highlighted the strengths and disruptive points of the service: ‘OneFootball offers a platform for all content creators and content owners in the football ecosystem to connect with the fan base. These creators or owners can be blogs, clubs, broadcasters, which are generally very relevant in the segment’.
The platform already has more than 30 million users, in an ecosystem that mixes presence on smartphones, web 3.0 and connected TV. ‘And then we have an owned and distributed business, which is an embedded player, essentially, where we make part of the content creators’ content available off-platform on websites of newspapers, publishers, and so on. This is the owned and distributed, the embedded player business. And those two things together, about 200 million’, he remarked.
One of the differentials of OneFootball is that compared to its competitors such as Barca TV or the audiovisual unit of La Liga / Mediapro Grup, is that they do not own the intellectual property of the content, but instead acquire these properties and rights to then produce additional new content. distribute and monetize. ‘We are carrying third-party content, so whoever has rights, whether bought, if it’s a broadcaster or inherently, if it’s a rights owner, we provide them a platform and a monetization toolbox to commercialize their content in a highly attractive environment because our core audience is a young gen, so the new generation of football’.
The way users access this content is by paying per event, season passes or events per sports club. ‘We monetize the content generated by football clubs, reaching fans directly, engaging with the enormous loyalty ecosystem we have. Importantly, we are not a reseller, so we host content, protect it, and deliver it to consumers. We also have customer support, so all transactions and costs are protected and validated’.
The platform has more than a dozen broadcast rights for different competitions in specific territories. The competitions 2. Bundesliga, DFL-Supercup and German Bundesliga, in Brazil; UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League, UEFA Europa Conference League, where some live matches on the App and the website by OneFootball in the outside of Europe from 2023–24 season, among others.
Likewise, it also has broadcasting rights in alliance with partners, such as Globo (Brazil), Eeleven Sports (Italy), Sportitalia (Argentina), Emtek’s SCM (Indonesia), MNC Media (Indonesia), Premier Sports (Spain, Germany, Portugal).
