The sports digital media market provides a supportive atmosphere for the continued success of XOS Digital. Read on to learn more about the current market climate.
Market Overview
The professional leagues have long understood the value of their trademarks and copyrights. They started organizing their staffs to maximize this value back in the 1980s. Today, each major professional sports league has its own properties division or business (NFL Films, NBA Entertainment, MLB.COM) which successfully monetizes its assets and properties. The value of these entities is in the billions.
On the other hand, the collegiate market has historically had no centralizing entity to help manage its rights and content. This led to Collegiate Licensing Company becoming the centralizing point for trademarks as applied to shirts, gear, hats and memorabilia, and more recently, in 2002 Collegiate Images (an XOS Digital company per 2008 acquisition) emerged to centralize the management of the collegiate markets' copyrights and multimedia content.
However, in recent years collegiate conferences, led by the Big 10's renegotiation of its broadcast rights agreements and the development of its own "Big 10 Network," have carved out the copyright to broadcast content (both historical and future) and school produced event-oriented content. This content was traditionally determined to be owned by the Networks under the old TV rights agreements. However, once these rights were awarded back to the Big 10, it triggered several MFN (Most Favored Nation) clauses with the other conferences. The Big 12 and Pac 10, among others, were able to regain the copyrights to much of their content, as well.
The most recent conference to renegotiate its broadcast agreements was the Southern Conference (SEC) in the summer of 2008. The SEC was able to negotiate a $3 billion combined rights deal with CBS and ESPN over the course of 15 years, and also retain the rights to all of the content produced around its events, whether produced by the broadcast partners or schools. This resulted in a significant amount of content owned by the SEC.
With the combination of XOS Digital's relationships, rights, technology platform and digital asset management acumen, the company was able to provide a much-needed and compelling service for the SEC through the creation of the SEC Digital Network.
As XOS gains greater influence within the digital asset management sports niche, professional leagues of all types also will take note of the company's proprietary technology to integrate video along with associated statistical information at the point of origin.