By Paul Nicholson
November 1 – 64% of people don’t leave home without their smartphone, 45% use their smartphone at events, and 43% would rather stop drinking beer than using their smartphone. These were some of the fact thrown out by Deutsche Telekom’s senior VP for Sports Marketing Henning Stiegenroth, speaking at the International Football Arena in Zurich on Monday.
Explaining how connected the world had become and was becoming, he said that investment in the roll out of networks in Europe is currently running at about $65 billion per annum, worldwide that investment is £182 billion. “People just want to be connected,” he said.
To emphasise the point he said that in the next 60 seconds there would be 175,000 tweets sent, 3 million videos watched and 700,000 Facebook messages written.
Deutsche Telekom has had a major shift in its approach to sports. Having invested in Bundesliga rights four years ago, and launched its own TV and IPTV platforms, it has now changed direction and this year started a co-operation with Sky.
“We have been competitors for four years and now we are friends. Why would we do this?” said Stiegenroth.
“Because four years ago it was hard to explain what our platform could do … we wanted to show that IPTV was something different which is why we started these connected features like watching a game whenever you want to … now we have all the premium content with Sky but still have the interactive features,” he said.
The driver of the new partnership has been the recognition by Deutsche Telekom that the branding of Sky and its content will build users faster than going alone, while for Sky the attraction is the huge reach that Deutsche Telekom has and its ability to deliver content interactively across all the mobile platforms.
This partnership is the polar opposite of the situation in the UK where the major telecoms giant, BT, has gone head-to-head with Sky and its content channels. Whether market forces push them to buddying up, like in Germany, in three or four years time, remains to be seen, but it looks highly unlikely.
“We have different platforms but they all work together,” Stiegenroth said. The ‘Entertain to go’ package is one platform covering all devices – laptops, smartphone, tablets – and enable the viewer to watch live TV anywhere. Central to the Deutsche Telekom proposition is still the interactivity that mobile devices and the internet provide.
Deutsche Telekom is now offering (or intends to offer) its subcribers a wide range of content services from tailoring Bundesliga coverage to the individual’s interests, live stats, tables and goals, through to fan involvement in ‘favouriting’, forums and engagement with sponsors.
The in-stadium experience for fans is also being enhanced with the mobile app providing pre-match content, a live stream of the game enabling replays, plus data on players and match stats live.
“Some things are already there, some things will take longer to come,” said Stiegenroth.
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