Peter Hutton, Facebook and the desire for simple answers

We went to Facebook's London HQ to talk to Peter Hutton before he heads off to New York to run their live sports strategy from over there.

It's hard to recall an executive hire that was met with such feverish over-interpretation than Hutton's move from Discovery Eurosport to Facebook in 2018. That most fashionable thing - a narrative - was forming. And like all good stories, it felt inevitable: This was the moment that Facebook would open that enormous cheque book and go on a sports rights spending spree that would make the satellite and cable TV boom look small fry.

'Facebook hires Eurosport chief for multibillion live push' screamed The Guardian's headline. 'Appointment made before deadline for bids on rights to stream Premier League matches'

This is the bloke who 'was instrumental' in Discovery Eurosport's £920million deal to buy the Olympic rights in Europe from 2022.
The subtext was clear. IT'S ALL GOING TO BE OK. The gravy train is not stopping at this station.
A year on, we're still waiting for those billion quid deals we convinced ourselves we were being promised.
So what's happening?
It turns out that life, which sometimes includes the sports business, is not story shaped. It's messier and potentially more interesting.

Three snippets to give you a glimpse:

On being the story

"I understand the desire of federations to find an easy answer to the potential decline of pay TV revenue. My move was seen as a personification of that change. which is an odd thing to live through."

The good old days in the rights market

"What amazed me about how the sports rights market worked was that it was an easy solution. You would sell the rights for three years, the broadcaster would deal with all the production and three years later the rights would go up again, and the incline of income would seem inevitable. Now, there's nervousness.

Facebook is wide and deep

"There used to be five or six different places in the sports business you went for different things. You watched the game on TV, you’d read the newspapers the next day to find out the detail, the marks out of ten, you’d go to the stadium to buy your ticket, you’d buy your merchandise at the club shop. Now, all those things can happen within a Facebook infrastructure. And when we say Facebook, we mean Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Occulus, the whole raft of platforms we have. There’s a reality that we’re now becoming more central to the sports business and we’re not just about the social media relevance that we had to start with."

Get the podcast direct from Unofficial Partner

Or go to iTunes

While you're there you can check out the rest of the Unofficial Partner podcasts, including Charlie Sale, James Brown, Alison Kervin, Paul Hawksbee, Derek Pringle and many more.

Spread the word.

Cheers

Richard and Sean

Richard Gillis, Editor
richard@unofficialpartner.co.uk

Sean Singleton, Publisher
sean@unofficialpartner.co.uk