Rights-holding for world sports has undergone dizzying transformation over the last few years, from over-the-air broadcast to cable to satellite to streaming. It’s sometimes difficult to keep up, especially with the technology changing every 18 to 36 months.
Here’s how difficult is can be: do you remember watching an FIH match on Bleacher Report? I don’t, either; the Warner Brothers/Discovery outlet was supposed to have had exclusive media rights for four years starting in 2019.
And think of this: some of the major events in world field hockey have either gone behind paywalls or emerged from them just this year.
A few years ago, you could see a raft of Olympic field hockey games on the NBC Sports app on your phone for free, but if you wanted to see FIH matches, you had to be a paid subscriber to WatchHockey, the video service for the world game.
Today, that hockey economy is completely reversed. The 2024 Olympics in Paris were moved behind the Peacock paywall, and you can still view replays of every match from last summer.
But as the FIH World League has gotten underway the last few weeks, that world competition has moved out from behind the WatchHockey paywall and is now available in North America on YouTube.
Of course, there are plenty of cable and satellite rightsholders around the world, such as Star, ESPN, Channel 7 in Australia, and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom who have shelled out lawful money to get exclusive rights to these matches in their territories. As such, I don’t think the move to free viewing in the Americas is a charitable enterprise.
Instead, I think it is a realization by the FIH that not enough American eyeballs are watching the matches and being hit by sponsor messages from companies like Volvo, Samsung, and the growing number of betting sites which are now part of the field hockey fabric.
Now, I don’t have the figures as to how many subscribers Bleacher Report and Watch Hockey had in North America as a result of putting major world hockey events behind paywalls. But it can’t have been enough to justify continuing them in this new media era.
