After years of talk mostly by the previous corporate regime a livesports streamingtier is finally coming toMax.
The $10-a-monthstreamingadd-onwill go live on October 5, just before the start of the Major League Baseball playoffs.
Discovery Sports, spoke with Deadline about the Max initiative.
Luis Silberwasser & JB PerretteGetty/Courtesy
Why not consider offering it as a stand-alone service?
JB PERRETTE:Weve had 10 years of experience with that in Europe since our involvement in Eurosport.
It had a stand-alone Eurosport Player app that weve been iterating and playing with for a decade.
And we learned a lot from that.
So were not new to this in that respect.
So thats the model that we followed.
LUIS SILBERWASSER:There were three learnings for us from B/R Live.
The first, to JBs point, is that stand-alone is very hard.
That makes it even harder.
And on the positive side, we also learned about the power of the Bleacher Report brand.
DEADLINE: How have you managed the delicate task of selling this through conceptually with pay-TV distributors?
PERRETTE:We dont pretend that there wont still be people who are disgruntled and unhappy.
Such is the nature of evolution.
But Id say a couple different things.
1 is a foundational matter.
Weve already been partnering with the affiliates.
So, were not taking stuff off the pay-TV ecosystem.
All the content that sits there will stay there.
It will be simulcast on the service, so what were doing is providing consumers with more choice.
DEADLINE: Is that also how you ended up where you did on pricing?
So, we need to provide incremental revenue so we can substantiate and support the entire ecosystem of sports.
We ultimately just want to find a way to make this additive.
We wanted to make it really clear and simple.
And in all of our conversations with our league partners, were completely aligned.
This is not about exclusivity or taking anything away from linear.
We want people to have the choice.
Does adding this sports tier to Max position you better for those discussions?
SILBERWASSER:I think so.
But its not a surprise to the NBA either.
Weve been working with them on our plan.
I think our interests are aligned.
We want to be able to reach a large amount of consumers or viewers.
We know whats happening with the linear ecosystem.
So, from a league perspective this makes a lot of sense.
It strengthens not only their reach but our partnership with them.
And, as we know, its the same for news and other things.
The customer segments of streaming and pay-television may have 10 years ago have been more overlapping.
Increasingly, they are divergent.
So, we do look at this as having real potential to be complementary.
And with pay-TV declining, everybody should be worried.
Trying to recreate that in streaming just makes no sense to that.
