Our Sports Broadcaster That Just Re-Gained Their Monopoly

Sky Sport Regains Their Monopoly Status

Spark spork is quitting the New Zealand sports broadcast market. And New Zealand sports fans and athletes will soon understand why governments worldwide put up the good fight against monopolies.

The robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th century got their name for a reason. Monopolies are sanctioned robberies.

Sports broadcasting is a two-sided market. There are the people who entertain and the people who yell from the couch. While the broadcaster sits in between.

So when there's only one broadcaster left in town (i.e. Sky Sports), both athlete and fan lose.

Sky sport now has no one to bid against for local TV rights and no one to compete against for our tv screens. This means less money for sporting organisations and increased subscription costs for us.

The Outcome: The very day Spark moved on, Sky announced they were raising their prices by $3 per subscriber per month. And that's on the back of making a $62.2 million profit (up 41% from the year prior).

We should expect tv rights down rounds to follow and a whole lot more shitty broadcasting.

Our Take

Monopolies are bad for everyone except the people who own them.

While corporate monopolies are constantly scrutinised... just this week, the DOJ recently tried to make a case against Google ads.

There are micro monopolies everywhere that no one blinks an eye at, which creates handsome opportunities for the entrepreneurs of this world.

There's the small town supermarket or petrol station - if you ever enjoyed a Wanaka summer pre-2020, you'll know what we mean.

Or, going even smaller, the personal trainer at a gym with a nutrition or masseuse qualification.

As long as there is enough willing bidders to make offering your thing worth it - it's hard to lose when you don't have any competition.

#STARTUPS

Girls Get Off Wins Worlds Best Add

Or you get so damn good at something that your competitors don't even matter.

That's what New Zealand's naughtiest start-up, Girls Get Off, has done.

Most of our go to add platforms like Meta, Google and so on have banned the advertisement of most things sex-related. So founders Viv Conway and Jo Cummins have ventured off the beaten path while building their D2C brand.

Instead of ad-spend, they've used class, creativity and cunning to grow their social audience beyond 100,000 people and $1 million in annual revenue just two years in.

And last week, their latest marketing campaign, a collab with Motion Sickness studios aptly named close the gap, was awarded top 6 in the world on BestAds and best print ad by Luerzers Archive International.

Ka pai.

Our Take

Constraints create creativity. When you can't follow the usual playbook, you have to look elsewhere, i.e. in the tails of life, where the asymmetric payoffs of entrepreneurship really show off.

And when you've got the skills Viv and Jo do, you're not even taking on much extra risk.

So the takeaway here might not be to just play to your strengths but use those strengths to play where others won't.

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