Setanta Sports

The OTT sports platform for the CIS market

Setanta Sports is a company that specializes in content distribution. Its bet is on the commercialization of sports competitions through digital markets, specifically on OTT platforms. Its base of operations is in Georgia and its area of action is in its own country, the CIS market area and the Baltic countries. Its platform, in full growth, is designed by Endeavor Streaming and is in full technological expansion. Their goal is to offer consumers the best possible quality and personalized experience. We spoke with Tamar Badashvili, CEO of Setanta Sports, and she gave us an update on their evolution plans.

How was Setanta Sports born and how it has been developed through the years?

The story of Setanta Sports started more than 20 years ago. It was an Irish company that started buying sports licenses of some countries in the European market. After that, they expanded all around the world. The company is still run by the same founders, but is headquartered in Georgia. With all these sport licenses, the managers started to sell them to other bigger companies like beIN Sports, for instance. With these profits, around two years ago we acquired business in Georgia, Setanta Sports as it is today.

One year ago we started an active communication of our OTT platform together with our TV channels. After some time, we looked at the figures in Georgia and we found out that they were quite impressive. That’s how we decided that we were going to replicate the same business model in other countries.

With this in mind, we acquired the whole CIS market, excluding Georgia and also the Baltic region, then we decided to enter the Ukrainian market just before the war started. We signed the agreement by the end of January and the war started in the end of February, unfortunately.

After that, we decided to diversify our targets and, recently, we entered the Philippines market. We are continuously expanding our business and I expect that next year we will have some additional market or even several markets in our portfolio. Now, we move on to other countries such as Azerbaijan, for example, which is quite promising from today’s perspective.

How has your OTT been developed?

Our OTT platform has been developed by Endeavor

Streaming, a company specialized in sports digital markets. With its platform as a base, we purchased and continue to purchase licenses and broadcasting rights for various sports.

Apart from these distribution services, what other services does

Setanta Sports offer?

The business is developed in three main directions.

The first one is the TV distribution. We cover 15 markets and we have TV channels in those markets. It is precisely the main part of our business. In most countries, we have at least two channels, even three.

The second part is the OTT platform, because we understand that most people, especially those who watch soccer, switch to digital channels on a daily basis. Users watch sports and use a second device to consult statistics or share emotions on social networks. On our OTT or social networks, you can interact and have the opportunity to share your emotions with people.

The third part of our business is, precisely, social networks. They include, above all, the YouTube channel. On this channel we have many subscribers and also viewers who frequently watch our content because we have the highlights of each market. We also show highlights and interviews on these channels. Now we are working on regional content that will also be part of our communication strategy on YouTube, as well as Facebook and Instagram.

The world of digital content distribution is evolving towards the development of the user experience. One of the possibilities to improve it is to add interaction to the platforms. Do you plan to introduce these capabilities?

We have not integrated social tools into our platform yet. We are developing them for our news portal, which is in the creation phase. There we will give our users the opportunity to interact with the content.

On our OTT platform, as it is made and supported by Endeavor Streaming, the modifications we would like to make would entail great efforts, especially for security reasons.

Regarding our platform, at the moment our business is focused on trying to offer the highest quality in streaming. Therefore, introducing extra functionalities or social tools would run the risk of not offering the highest possible quality.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to integrate all these capabilities into a single platform?

In fact, we are considering it for the future. And I’ll tell you more; right now we are negotiating with one of the main companies that offer the co-watching experience. Thanks to this capability, viewers of certain sports content would be able to enjoy the competition together, share moments and emotions without giving up the quality that watching this content on the platform gives you.

The second tool we want to introduce is a source of statistics. The goal is to prevent our users from having to resort to a second platform or application.

We have obtained these two directions of development thanks to our own research. Interestingly, our findings tell us that users of such platforms do not want a joint chat, as other leading streaming platforms have, or a forum, but after what happened with COVID-19 what they want is to have the possibility to enjoy the content together.

What is your business model?

The most important part is, of course, content distribution. On a descending scale, in second place are the revenues we receive from OTT. We expect that in the future it will become the main source of our revenues. Below that is sponsorship. We achieve this through sponsorship agreements with other companies in other industries, such as betting, telephony, finance, e-commerce platforms, etc. Another direction from which our revenues come from are the sublicenses we sell to other television channels. Finally, there are the revenues from advertising on our platforms.

Additionally, we’re also selling the social media partnerships together with the other brands, but this is the smallest part of the business.

Speaking of advertising, are you thinking of introducing some kind of OTT advertising model?

We believe that this is not the best experience for the user who already pays a price to access the content.

In our case, in live broadcasting we do not have commercial breaks or back shots with advertising, but we do in video-ondemand content. The VOD content we offer are highlights.

However, we did introduce these models where the platform is free-to-air. In the Uzbekistan and Philippines markets we offer the platform for free, users just have to register. In that case, we add the advertising spot.

What experience personalization strategies does the Setanta Sports platform offer?

We are in the process of implementation. Now we are focusing on micro-segmentation of information. When users register on our website, we know their cell phone number and also their email address, and then we do the micro-segmentation and send them information about the content they are interested in. If the user sees the Premiere

League, for example, they will be interested in other leagues as well, so we promote LaLiga content in their profile. The effort we are developing is to make these promotions in an individualized way and not by segments.

On the other hand and in this regard, we also want to offer personalized advertising experiences following the same model of personal interests.

What technological tools are you using for these processes?

In fact, these are solutions that we are researching in-house and that, once the optimum point is reached, we will outsource to other companies. We are doing this because the current market offer did not cover all our needs. For example, some companies’ solutions were useful for marketing automation, but their solutions did not include content personalization. Thanks to this research, we completed a technical document with all our needs. We sent it to companies and, as a result, a certain company will create the most suitable tool for us.

How is the content protected and how is the security of user data guaranteed?

We have a world-standard security measures in place. We are protecting the Digital Rights of each content that we offer to our audience (DRM) as well as the end-user data.

We are fully compliance with the GDPR standards.

We care about the users and their privacy as we care for our own. It’s a challenging topic, however, we follow all the standards that are applicable from the privacy perspective and by being DGPR compliance we raising the bar for the other service providers in those non-GDPR countries.

What has been the biggest technological challenge faced by the platform?

The technological advancements that welldeveloped countries have seen last few years, is something that is not quite applicable for the majority of the countries we are operation in. It introduces different layers of the technological challenges that you need to tackle and resolve, so that you are delivering from grass to glass the quality that is in accordance to our benchmark. It requires a lot of fine-tuning your hardware and software capabilities to make sure your quality is equally adaptive for any user in any point of counties out of bunch. To make sure, that all the services are available 24/7/365. We worked hard to have the minimum delay for live streams, have the highest applicable quality individually for the users, and give them freedom of

What are Setanta Sports’ future plans?

The first is technical development, how to get more features for users.

The second is moving users, transferring users to the OTT platform, to increase subscribers to our platform. We are trying in different ways, from B2B to B2C. For example, we now have coverage of up to 25 million households on the TV channel. We understand that it is a great opportunity for us to use this TV channel in order to promote our OTT platform. This is the main idea, to have all these people on our platform.

We also want to get these numbers up with diversification. We don’t want to focus on just one industry, we want to cover much more like for example with supermarkets.

That’s really interesting, how are you going to do it?

Well, we are not only considering it for retail stores, but we are also thinking of introducing it in insurance companies, construction companies, real estate companies, etc. There are many possibilities in this regard, there are many business opportunities because there are many companies that can offer their users subscriptions to our platform.

We do it in the following way: when we approach another company and we see that they have, for example, a customer loyalty card, we offer them to buy the subscriptions with a big discount so that their users can benefit from it, or we give them the subscription and tell them that this is the price we want to receive from them, always with a discount.

choice from where they want to onboard, or enjoy the platform otherwise.

What makes Setanta Sports different from other competitors?

When we look at our competitors, we look at both the big players and the OTTs that cover our region. The biggest advantage we have, in the countries where we operate, is that we are the only ones that have the full range of content in the market. There are no other OTT platforms where you can watch La Liga, Premier League, League One, UFC or Formula One together.

Even if we compare ourselves with the big players, it is difficult for them to have all kinds of content available. Moreover, in those cases the distribution rights are not exclusive, so the competition between them is even greater.

Thanks to the coverage of so many regions, we have the best prices and the best offers. This is how we are gaining the competitive advantage over the others. 