OVO Mobile doubles down on 'niche' sports coverage

Josh McDonnell
By Josh McDonnell | 29 March 2019
 

OVO Mobile is doubling down on coverage of badminton in Australia, becoming the official broadcast partner of Badminton Worldwide Federation (BWF) in Australia with a four-year rights deal.

As the international governing body for badminton, BWF oversees more than 175 national competitions from around the world, with an average of four national and international tournaments every week held across five continents, many of which are available for televising.

As BWF’s official Australian broadcast partner, OVO will offer pay-per-view access to more than sixteen selected tournaments on OVOPlay.

OVO’s deal with BWF follows securing the global broadcast rights for Badminton Australia events in 2018. The deal was OVO’s first to cover all distribution channels including free-to-air broadcast, pay TV, live event streaming, and all digital and mobile channels.

"There is a massive audience for badminton in Australia. Since we started broadcasting Badminton Australia events six months ago, our unique viewer audience for badminton has reached 50,000 – a number that will grow as we start broadcasting international tournaments on OVOPlay,” OVO CEO Matt Jones says.

“Badminton is an excellent example of a sport that has a growing fan base in Australia, but very little opportunity to reach that audience through traditional broadcasting. This is what we created OVOPlay for, to connect fans with fantastic content relating to the sports and entertainment they love, that they can’t get anywhere else."

OVO’s combined BWF and Badminton Australia coverage on OVOPlay will deliver more than 500 hours of unique content each week and a bank of more than 300 hours of highlights and previous tournament matches.

In the past 12 months, OVO has attracted more than 1.5 million views across the range of sports and entertainment content now available exclusively on OVOPlay.

Previously speaking to AdNews, Jones revealed the business would continue to back "sub-culture sports" and also had plans to push for a bigger international presence.

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