Is Sky in the midst of a structural crisis or is it just market adjustments relating to audiovisual products? “Content is the King” and football on television is his realm and Bill Gates was a prophet to imagine that the war for the supremacy of the audiovisual market passes through the control of the contents. The corollary of the quote can be summarized as "television is what you see through the television" and if this does not offer what the public is asking for, the remote control becomes the magic wand capable of magically changing the cards on the table.
It is within this frame that part of the can be read possible crisis of Sky Italia, perhaps too early to be certified in structural terms. The only fixed point capable of allowing weighted assessments on this crisis is the 2020 budget where we read a loss of over 650 million euros, immediately covered by the American parent company Comcast and, jointly a decrease in revenue from subscriptions which go from about 2,5, 2019 billion in 2,3 to approximately 170 billion last year with a consequent contraction in advertising which is reduced by approximately XNUMX million compared to the previous period.
If, on the other hand, we move on to analyzing the data on audiences and television audiences, the reasoning becomes more complex and perhaps less relevant than it appears in the press. According to what was revealed by Studio Frasi which we consulted, on the basis of Auditel data (reference period 1 January - 22 September 2021 cf. the same period 2020 on total individuals in the average day 24H) a more complex situation is highlighted. In the interval indicated, all the broadcasters lost viewers: the television audience dropped from 10,8 million to around 10 (specifically, Rai dropped from 3,8 to 3,6 million, Mediaset from 3,4 to 3,1 million and Sky ( pay + free) from 0,69 to 0,59 million. This is a relatively modest number (about 92 less) and if we then look at the data on the number of individuals (over 4 years) who in the last seven months ( 31 January – 1 August) saw Sky go from 9,9 to 9,1 million viewers Considering the summer break in between, these numbers don't seem to be significant.
As regards the alleged crisis of Sky in particular, it is necessary to add a perhaps trivial but fundamental observation: in Italy and in the rest of the world there was the Covid pandemic which could have radically changed the cards on the table of the audiovisual market. There have been long months during which large numbers of television audiences were glued to the war health bulletins while the whole world of entertainment, not just sports, was necessarily and rightly at a standstill. It was precisely during the worst months of the pandemic that the tender for the assignment of the rights to broadcast the images of Serie A, which then went to DAZN, ended. Two levels of evaluation therefore intersect: the first refers to market logics and choices and, in this sense, it is legitimate to ask because Sky has given up on relaunching DAZN's latest offer (which was awarded the auction for around 2,5 billion euros with the participation of TIM for the three-year period 2021-24). The second is purely accidental: how much could the pandemic have influenced the current situation? The possible answers are destined to remain unknown, at least until the market has partially stabilized. The game is still ongoing and then fatally intersects with a second part of the reasoning that we are now proposing.
As known, DAZN immediately encountered numerous problems right from the diffusion of the first games due essentially to the bottleneck that occurred when, at the same time, a large number of users connected to the network. The Telecommunications Guarantee Authority wanted to see clearly and has launched an investigation to assess whether there have been violations regarding the disservices suffered by users. In this regard, the hypothesis has been advanced that it could be possible that the English publisher Blavatnik could or should transfer part of the rights to Serie A to Sky. In this case, the picture could change further e the accounts on the crisis of Sky they should only be postponed to a new phase yet to be verified.
All of this, however, brings us back to an axiom that has long been known and consolidated: the binomial content and container, i.e. technology and content are inseparable. You can have the most efficient and pervasive distribution platforms but if you don't have adequate and attractive content to disseminate, the market penalizes you. And Sky, as regards the methods of diffusion of television products on the technological front, has always shown excellent performance on the three reference platforms: firstly satellite and then digital terrestrial and lastly broadband. Which, on the other hand, DAZN cannot boast of, its direct competitor on football which, at least at the moment, is betting everything on the Web with TIM as its main partner.
Just to give you an idea: Reed Hastings, owner of Netflix, which knows about television broadcasting networks and technologies with its formidable and highly efficient CDN (Content Delibery Network) has recently announced the purchase of the Roald Dahl library to try to face the aggressiveness of Disney+ which becomes more and more marked. The competition on technologies, on audiovisual contents, remains global and total.
