How Ligue 1 built its own streaming platform from scratch

0:00Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the next episode in our podcast mini series, The New Economics of Phantom. My name is Chris Tom, the community lead joined by my co host Nick Meacham. And today we're joined by our guest, Cyprien Castanato, who is the head of product and innovation, or head of platform and innovation, I should say, it league on now. Nick and I are quite excited about this conversation. We've been covering league on for a couple of years now in sort of the story that's gone across it from its rights negotiations, launching its D to C, but it's always been from Nick and I's perspective. So today we've been able to speak with you Cyprien to get your insights, particularly on this journey. We're really excited about it and fits really well into the overall series talking about the new economics of Phantom, giving how much we've been talking about the direct to consumer relationships. So we're really happy to have you on today Cyprien. Yeah, thanks about Chris, thanks Nick and yeah, really happy to be here. I think, as we're

1:00mentioning, we had like a year and a half that were very packed with a lot of things that happened and we're now like approaching like the third map round of the second season. So I think we're in a good place to like tell the story about league one plus, but also to have some first insight about the first year and the project in into the ambitious target that we have for the season two. So glad to be here. Absolutely, and we'll dive into those and just to give a quick summary for those that haven't caught up on the first two episodes and certainly would recommend going back doing those first episode we sat down with the CEO, Genius Sports Mark Locke and for Mark talked quite a bit about sort of the changing dynamics and the potentially the end of the era relying on broadcast dollars for sports for so long that relationship is provided and funded sports to be able to build their relationships with the challenge then being from an infrastructure perspective that rights holders weren't building relationships with fans fans were being monetized, but that monetization was taking place between broadcasters and fans not necessarily

2:01the rights holders themselves and the need to build an infrastructure in place to develop that direct to consumer relationship. In the second episode, we had Roman push from UEFA talking more specifically around utilizing data. So once you build those infrastructures and you're collecting that first party data, how do you then turn data that you're collecting from those fans and actually turning it into something that drives impact and value from a business perspective? So today, Cyprian, where it's more kind of combining maybe a little bit of the two of those where there is it will be a little bit of a conversation about infrastructure and building that platform going directly in consumer, but also some of the learnings you've had from a data perspective. So I do think this conversation is going to blend those two topics together where maybe Nick you can agree discreet, maybe those first conversations were a little bit more theoretical and talking through the economics of fan over today. We're going to get to talk about something in that is live existing in the flesh. Yeah, absolutely. And obviously it is one of these let's call it a case study that I think much of the industry is really intrigued to be following and to be seeing how it plays out

3:02because of the uncertainty around what strategy suits the sports industry and particularly football moving forward, but whether it be domestically or internationally and there's loads of variations of different tactics and strategies being played out across the industry. But I think the Ligun strategies probably the most watched one for various reasons. So I definitely keen to get a bit of a sense of that. I would love to go back a little bit to understand Cyprian, I guess the journey as well that you've had because I from talk us through some of the timelines I'm going off piece here a little bit Chris perhaps, but talk us through some of the timelines from when you went actually it's green light we're going for this to then launching in what that journey was like. Yeah, definitely. I think what's kind of interesting about like the Ligun Plus story is that I think there were kind of two timelines that were like merged together. So the first big step was like the domestic tender that was launched prior to 24-25 season was like big decisions to be made

4:08because as you can imagine the stakes were very high we were ending the partnership that we had with prime video and being sports and after everything that went with media pro and canna plus and so on. It was like one of the key moments for LFP media. The tender wasn't successful so we entered like a phases where we were just like negotiating with different potential buyers and back at the time we were already anticipating this scenario about going DTC. So what we made is we partnered with some infrastructure partner like media one studios that were like building a network operating center from scratch and we were like it's worse investing a bit in a backup solution because if we ended up not having a broadcast deal at the end it's better to have like spent a bit of money on that rather than being in a situation where you just like did the right to anyone.

5:14At the end of the negotiation we ended up like partnering with Dayzone and being sports. So the whole project about Ligun Plus that was called Liguan Max at the time because there were also some discussions with HBO Max that were launching for the Olympics and so on. So we partnered with Dayzone and being sports for the season and we haven't stopped the Liguan Plus project but we have put it on hold like putting all the elements on the side saying okay if at some point we need to reactivate we have the clear steps and as you know like for many reasons the partnership with it hasn't couldn't go to the end of the contract so I would say around May 2025 we had the clear decision of our CEO back at the time and Nicola the Tadano that got the green light from the clubs

6:17saying listen Dayzone is not ready to pay any more for broadcasting. The French market is complicated in terms of people ready to pay for rights. Let's be owner of our own distribution and no matter what happens after that you will be in a way better situation if you have a backup option compared to just being offering the rights to anybody. So we had the very tough summer last year because between May and the beginning of the season we needed to build everything almost from scratch and I think the three elements that were seen this moment were first we had anticipated some things as I was mentioning we already had like a network operating center for creating the channel itself but we also had a D2C ecosystem because we had a let's call it a rather small platform

7:21operating in the UK at the time. The second key element was to have like a clear line that was drawn by our CEO meaning everybody had now an objective to be ready for the beginning of August and there was like no in between situation where you just okay let's call another broadcaster and we see what happens and so on and I think the third one is like just the dynamism that it created internally like everybody was packed into meeting rooms two hours a day for like almost two months and it created like lot of synergies and what I think is one of the biggest achievement is how everybody at the league went from a standard B2B job that we were used to have true okay let's how do we do B2C marketing how do we communicate to fans that are like clients and not just like followers and social accounts and so yeah it's a it's a very short time on

8:25a scale to launch a D2C offer but on the other hand because it was so sure so thought there was no alternatives so we created kind of a commando atmosphere that I think made it through I was really interesting to go on Chris I think we're probably going to talk about the same thing there Nick so go ahead because I saw your eyes right up on I was just going to say I mean those timelines are pretty crazy and but it was obviously both force of great foresight and also you had you know the platform running for in at least in the UK so you had some of the ingredients and sprinklings there plus the relationship I think was within devastating streaming now who are now in by DeltaTray operating that platform so how I think going to the to sort of that scene of all those meetings you know your B2B business your background was in the right space for one I can see as well I don't think there was pretty too many OTT streaming experts in a house at the time because that wasn't what wasn't the play just talk about that dynamic how much should it

9:26did you have to bring in expertise did you all just have to work it out because it wasn't time to bring in people and then that leaning leaning into partners that you already had like your endeavors streaming and DeltaTrays and others to get you through that period what was what was that like yeah as you were saying I think with the short timing that we had we had like no time to recruit anybody or to get a big OTT team so everything was like almost everything was done in-house but I think we relied a lot on our partners as we were mentioning Endeavour now DeltaTray that they had one year of experience of the service in the UK obviously not that the same scale but everything from the subscription module to like live-up steam to scheduling and everything they were ready to absorb this kind of project so I think on the OTT sites we made a mix between

10:28having partners that were really involved into the project but also use the internal expertise as we're saying we were no like OTT experts but we had a lot of people internally with some tech and operation background and we acquired almost five years ago a big startup in France Montpétigazon which is kind of the number one fantasy game over three million players in France and they were obviously operating like some apps some developers and so on so the idea was to just try to put everybody around the table to look at the qualifications and expertise and then to say okay listen the people that were more on the the brand awareness about Ligant as a whole are going to put those qualifications for League 1 plus obviously with some agencies and so on all the direct relation with fans were put into the CRM team with people that were already

11:30like operating the fantasy customers like the fans on social media and so on and then on the OTT sites a mix of people that were like working on the UK platform but also people that have like a tech background and then like you just put everybody on the table you put a gigantic pressure by the CEO and then you hope that everything goes well well I think that's interesting because that's sort of the whole crux Nick I feel like you and I talk about this at sports for all the time with all of our events is this is the shift that's going on across all of sports is it's so long they've been B2B businesses you sell your media rights to another business you sell your IP licensing rights to another business that it does require a completely different tech stack a completely different set of expertise that feels like Nick like that's the whole crux of everything and feels like we talk about sports for a not just on this series at our events on our other podcasts like that is really kind of where we're at as an industry absolutely and I think it's one of these things that

12:32you know if if League 1 had more time that probably would have taken a different approach you know in terms of bringing in more different resources maybe taking longer to find other partners to help deliver better products or different different aspects of a who knows you don't need to speculate because it's it is speculation you had to do what you had to do but that whole challenge where you have we see where there's external expertise being brought in from outside the industry there's people from within the industry who've already been through a similar experience somewhere else and or in this instance where there's just people within the business that have to get together and work out the right strategy for different reasons sometimes it can be a budget reason sometimes it can be a time reason and they can be all all these other layers to it so I think this is one of these things I feel like still the industry when you compound it with what's happening in media as a transformation of consumption we're constantly in this whole sort of moving window or everything's trying to change we're all having to constantly change our ways as we go along whether it's not

13:32just League 1's example but it's right across the whole ecosystem frankly so yeah must have been must have been a fun ride but yeah taking it taking it taking it further forward from what we saw in the industry look like a pretty good you know a pretty successful launch what was your view how did how did it how did it compare relative to expectations and maybe what are some of the numbers that we've seen also in the media briefing there's anything else you can share no and definitely I think I've just read that we had like very clear objectives in terms of where we needed the product to go where we needed the channel itself to go because one of the nuances was also that League 1 plus was not only a platform but also a linear channel and not only OTT but also like with some distribution partner with telco distribution and so on so this is what we call like a hyper distribution where we try to be as close as every fan in France that we could get

14:36and in terms of the numbers and success like the objectives for the first year was to meet the 1 million targets in terms of subscription and the good thing of that is that we met this target like three weeks into the first season so it was like obviously also a huge stamp for us that we could show to the clubs presidents because one of the nuances also is that we were not like a media business we're still like a football league so it means that everything that I just described and that that can feel a bit scary was even scarier for like clubs president that we're looking at the numbers and like knowing if they can pay the wages of the players if they can make like some transfer windows and so on so the 1 million targets was achieved pretty quickly which gave us also some sense of okay this goes in the right way just keep continue to make the service grow and then I

15:39think during the season it was also the learning curve of okay at the beginning it's kind of the honeymoon period for the users there were not happy with the previous broadcaster with Dayzone for many reasons like pricing and everything so when they saw an offering that was honestly a good deal in terms of the price and the offering there was a real dynamism of people that were okay let's try to help the club and get the subscription and then after a couple of months you're more okay how do I optimize the turn rate how do I keep engaging people even of the of season and so on so I think the key figures of the first season were very positive but obviously the ambition grows with the numbers that are good to start with so we have an objective for the season 2 to continue to expand like 1.1 1.2 let's see where we land at and the other tricky part is that

16:43and Ligue 1 plus could be a long-term solution but we never know so we also have to navigate in an uncertain environment where like it's no secret there was an article with our CEO that is working maybe on launching a tender for the end of the year or beginning of next year so I think we see Ligue 1 plus as kind of our life insurance it means if nothing happens on the market we still have that we're like a good number of subscribers like some very happy viewers and so on and if the market changes we'll have a plenty of time to adapt well I think that is interesting that it reflects the larger ecosystem obviously this is taking place in France but we've talked about it across Europe we're seeing media rights stagnate and go down this is not something that's unique to what you're going through in France a friend of sports pro Andre is Hayden back when he used to work at DFL

17:44always talked about they were prepared to go direct to consumer if they didn't feel the broadcast rights reflected what they thought the value was of their their IP one of my favorite podcasts we've ever done of all time was talking to Paul CFC a Greek football club who were in a similar situation that didn't feel that they were getting the value for the rights that they they wanted so they went and build a D to C platform and then the next year got offered double the amount of the money for it so I guess the question is sippery when you see this across you know I don't think maybe three four years ago maybe people would have talked about this but when you start thinking about the value of D to C is this something that you do think is going to be a part of the larger ecosystem particularly in Europe looking at trends around media rights that more people need to be taking more attention to this or doing what you guys did which was start taking preemptive steps to be able to protect the value of your rights or you know or people reaching out to you across other European football leagues to kind of understand what you've gone through oh I bet yeah that's what I think honestly on the the big movement from like traditional like broadcast

18:48TL to D to C I think for the moment like the the clear rational behind it is that I think you get more money from doing broadcast TL still at the D to C one of the main reason for that is that going D to C is not I would say just from A to B it's a process where then to get the benefits of getting D to C means also to embrace the change of the model to embrace owning the data and so on so I think on the short term many of the big leagues are like in other sports and so on they would look at the numbers and they would make less money with getting D to C but where I think D to C could be very like interesting is as a side project that you can use as a leverage not just domestically speaking but on a lot of international territories and it was actually the reason why we launched

19:49the first OTT in the UK at the first time like about the time it was a legal and pass so I would say and as we're saying Chris we had many discussion with all the leagues football leagues close to France that was struggling a bit with the same issue that we had with like a broadcaster that is on the roller coaster and you never know what is going to happen on the next season and I think my advice is obviously if you look at the numbers D to C might not be the best option right now on the domestic market we're kind of the like the strange player in the market but when you see the tendency the media rights staggering or like going down some of the contract that are just like breaking a broken midterm I would say having a robust D to C offering that you can deploy in a couple of weeks is like definitely something that people should be investing to and another element that I think could be a good model is not just going D to C but partnering the

20:57D to C strategy with some distribution deals and I think we were discussing you were asking Nick like the key success that we had obviously it's a numbers but I think it's also the the number of partners that we managed to onboard into the project in a couple of weeks so on the French markets we are partnering prime video days and all four major telcos we have Le Kip like number one sports media and France and we have Molotov TV so a lot of distributors that you can not only use like as a new distribution channel but also as a marketing tool and it just creates like a good ecosystem and I think what the Premier League is doing in Singapore is kind of also a mixed model where the partnering not only on D to C but also on distribution so I would rather see this as a like a positive model then like a last minute option

22:00yeah yeah I just wondering Cypheryne on that I was one of the things I was going to ask you back because that's the thing I think that was lost on a lot of people is that you guys did incredible in securing those distribution partnerships very quickly with a lot of partners to ensure that you weren't just lost in the abyss and having to throw so much investment into marketing to get this out because that would have been to get it off the ground would have been even bigger loss leader then could be could be imagined what for those that I don't understand those types of carriage deals I mean what can you tell us about the constructor then did you have a very standardized approach is it just a revenue share is it minimum guarantees that had to be negotiated how complex were those deals because you work so quickly to get them done yeah and also I think the main approach that we decided to go with was like to to offer to all the distribution partner the same conditions the idea was to go to go with a revenue share that you had when carrying the Liguan plus channels and with the mechanism of the more you get subscribe subscribers

23:04the more revenue share you get it was also a way of incentivizing the people to sell more in order to get like a bigger share of the of the pie and I think what we tried to to put on paper was a very simple approach that Liguan plus and Liguan as a product is one of the top sports property in France and that obviously we're we're not going to do other specific approach on each distributor the idea was okay we're launching what we think is a very good product do you want to be part of the story and then like the more the Liguan is performing the more everybody is performing so I think that was the approach and honesty the key success that we achieved is also that all the distributors that we talked to were very involved in the

24:05project and usually around June July and August for the tailgates for example in France nobody's here everybody's on vacations and we had like all the people working so hard to make it happen and with like almost no issue so big things to them also because otherwise we couldn't say do it one of the things oh sorry Nick I just wanted to circle back on something slightly when you're talking through your strategy from a D to C perspective I appreciate the fact that you didn't describe it as a silver bullet because one of the the quotes I come back to quite a bit um I don't know if you're familiar with Simon Jordan used to be the chairman of a crystal palace he's a radio host now but he always talks about you know the fragmentation in the UK and he's like you could solve it if the Premier League just built a D to C platform there's 30 million Premier League fans in the UK sold for a hundred pounds subscription and then bang the Premier League's got three billion pounds right in its pocket you sort of were talking through there and I think maybe just maybe put a pin in that balloon this idea that D to C and OTT is just pure revenue you

25:10I think you're talking through there they're like it's not necessarily that so I think just maybe talk a little bit more about kind of the P&L and the the side of things that isn't just hey we launch this and it's all good storage it's pure profit some of the actual costs and things that go in there I think it was alluded to a little bit with Nick was talking about there the marketing cost but just the overall sort of balance of those two things and that it isn't just launch an OTT platform and just print money basically yeah definitely I think one of the learning that we had during the season is that you don't build an OTT offering or like a D to C offering the same way you just like send the feeds to a broadcaster and then it's not in your hands anymore as we were mentioning we were looking at the project as a P&L rather than just like net revenues so it means everything from the game production to like sending the feeds in different data center to making sure like the redundancy was robust enough so all the technical aspects obviously the

26:13price of your OTT platform also that you need to take into consideration and then on top of that you put all the marketing efforts in order for people to learn about League 1 Plus and I think what kind what was kind of a crazy at the beginning is that like all the investment that we have put on the table combined with all the investment that prime video days and all the tail cause of puts it made that if you were in France mid August last year like you couldn't like work five minutes without without seeing like a League 1 Plus ad so it was honestly kind of crazy so I think to this idea of like it's simple put the number of fans multiply it by the price of a monthly OTT and then you have the revenues is not as simple as that obviously I think it's it simplifies also a lot for the users and typically this year since we acquired the last game that

27:18was last year on bean sports it's the first time in the league history that we have all games on the same offering so I think 20 years ago you had all games on Canal Plus but you had to add different package so it was not like one subscription so I think there is obviously a lot of things that are more than just the revenues and the costs it means that the client support you need to handle it if there is an issue it's on your side not on not on the broadcasters so it's a bit more complicated than that but obviously we're not the Premier League yet also I would just curious that Sabrina in terms of now you hit the ground running you hit a million plus subscribe is very very quickly you went out with a really low price offer a real incentive for people to acquire and it turned people into acquires of the subscription very very quickly it sounds like by all accounts

28:19you've tried to increase the prices there's been also churn alongside that which is fairly inevitable we'll talk about that dynamic now how are you finding the challenge of not only keeping the subscribers but also continue to try and build because the expectations are high that you want to try and build up those revenues up to where they were or as close to the where they were as possible let's talk about some of that challenge going to year two yeah and I would also just quickly add to that Sabrina I'm a big lover of the topic of piracy and I think the price point also feeds into that one Chris yeah sorry sorry I just I thought that was my mode I'm just going to add into that Sabrina like you know piracy also being a thing where sort of the argument is build a product product that's good enough that people are willing to pay for it and I'm not necessarily pirate so I'm sorry Nadea that playing for later but just a lot of piracy is a topic and then like back pocket that's a lot in there to answer Sabrina is a lot in there to answer yeah I think to your point Chris I think the three main elements that we know face is obviously how do you end all

29:23a price increase for the fans and I think this was pretty straightforward because what we didn't want to do is to have a price increase without any justifications I think one of the big problems that fans were telling us the season before when it was not click one plus is that like with this kind of price I cannot like buy the legal subscription because I need to pay the first subscription then I need to pay a second one if my club is playing on the in sports so what we decided to do is to have like a price increase but that's linked to justification meaning like you have all nine games on the same platform and it might seem okay it's just one out of the nine but obviously being sports had some good games in terms of the picks and like for example if you were PSG or Marseille fan it means that you have like 30% more games of your team this season

30:24on the single subscription so I think the price increase was obviously in terms of the number of games but also in terms of you don't have to pay another subscription to get all games the second element is like how do you manage churn to be fully transparent we were like fearing a lot the off-period during the summer because like football is just like seasonal and there is like no game for two months and there was the World Cup so like everybody was focused on like the countries side and so on and the first learning is that we we performed way better than we expected in terms of maintaining those people on the platform and I think a good chunk of that is because we had from the very end of the World Cup we had friendly games of almost every league and clubs so I think we had 35 or 37 games during the months and a half before the season starts

31:28we had some European game of Monaco for like the conference league and so on so we managed to make the bridge between the two seasons but obviously we're still looking like at churned optimization how can you have some better churn strategy when people are leaving if you can have some below the line offering and so on and the third one is how do you get new people onto the platform because if you ask me I would say that the first millions of users it was kind of the fans that were ready to pay we needed to onboard it then back onto the platform because as we're saying also Chris anti-piracy is a big one is a big one so how do you convince people that maybe like bought the IPTV box and then how do you get them back onto the legal way of watching it but now the real challenge is I think the other million those are people that either I've dropped

32:30League of Coppola series ago or like prefer the Champions League or the Premier League or so on and I think on that matter we're trying to have an approach that's linked to the price with like some early bird offering with some promotion that will happen throughout the seasons but also with more edit all your stuff we have our weekly magazine on Sunday that is like free for everybody so that you can watch for free only one plus OTT but on all the prime video days and on telco and the idea is to buy small bits showing what we achieved in terms of edit all to the users so that we created kind of a a photo effect and the funny one is that like when you're watching the the weekly show you get the first minutes of the prime time game of Sunday for free and then the streams cuts so we're trying also to to encourage people to to go until the game and

33:31then to okay I'm just getting my credit card to pay for the subscription. I think I think one of the things that maybe we covered it I think Chris at the time and I thought was a really exciting approach was it was reported that that League of Coppola was going after World Cup rights themselves to try and address that retention issue and all the churn issue and you know looking at what the reports were at the time the the amount of money that was looking to be on the table was a no-brainer basically to try and make sure they kept the audiences but Chris I think we might have covered at the time it's been came out of the woodwork somehow with a deal last minute to usurp League of N and from what I have heard through different people is was the deal was basically you don't have to answer the sippering if you don't feel comfortable but basically the deal was agreed completely with LFP and with between FIFA and LFP directly and then FIFA I think sounds

34:32like they might have done a little cheeky tactic with being to try and get a last minute deal out of them and which took away again what another exciting case study would have been to see League of N acquiring the World Cup rights and seeing the impact it would have had on audiences because it could have not only helped retention but also could have been an interesting acquisition tool to see how people would have signed up to it so would have been one of the most I think was most interesting case study that didn't never happen but what suppose that? What is the interesting what is story? Yeah absolutely sorry I think that's awesome. I think obviously it was one of the like one of the interesting story that we had over the months of January and February obviously like for many reasons he didn't happen as you can imagine like very political and a lot of things happened between the League the FIFA and like being sports but I think the interesting thing is that if you take the whole story between May and January we went from like nothing on the French market

35:38to a platform with not only like one million subs but with also the power to potentially buy the World Cup rights so I think even if like it didn't happen for like many reasons internally we had the feeling that we were like creating something very meaningful and obviously I would have loved to work on the workup it could have been fun but I had like a quiet month of June and July it went on holiday so not bad at all but I think it was one of the elements to show that we're not just suffering from a situation with like bad market conditions but also proactively looking at some like alternative and some opportunities on the market and I think you know this this season we also have like the third division of France in the platform like League 3 that went professional

36:38this summer so it's not the biggest deal in terms of okay third league in France but it still shows some dynamism in terms of looking at opportunities being able to have a flexible strategy on the market and I think in this very uncertain ecosystems like this is one of the key quality data you have to keep in mind for year two Cypher we were able to keep a lot of those carriage relationships in place with your network what did that dynamic change at all? No we kept it very stable like we had some contracts long mid to long term contract with the distributor and I think for them it also made a lot of sense to like keep working on those distribution because even if those are markets that have like a big subscriber base since it's like a bundle the more you get people and the more season it are going the more like subscriber you get so yeah we have the same distributor

37:44we are still discussing with like almost every actor on the market as you can imagine we are still very irrational about it so like every occasion or every opportunity in terms of distribution like I welcome to partner with us just to circle this back on the pod series one of the things I mentioned at the top of the show and you know mark made a several comments about throughout was the fans have been monetized but it's largely been the broadcasters that have monetized the fans you're now in a situation where you have that direct relationship with the fans so just over the course of the last year what have you guys learned or what has changed for you as a business in terms of now sort of having that direct relationship with the fans you know you sort of talked about internally you guys and had to go through this shift going B to B to B to C but just what have you learned from the fans in this in this moment of transition for you guys yeah I think that's a very interesting one I think actually on the first season for many reasons we were more like trying

38:49to make the best out of the creating the the relation with the fans but without I think all the benefits and synergies that you can get from them and so obviously you don't become a B to C business like in a step of the finger so season one I would say it's more how do you get the right information and how you get to write KPIs to understand what the fans actually wants so like some key learnings that we had is that a big chunk of the fans are ready to get like an engaging subscription so they pay not only for one month but they are ready to to have a 12 month subscription because as I was saying before I think the first million subscribers are the one that's a like really big fund of league on and the second element that was kind of a surprise is that even if you try to look at the week as a big funnel of like getting people on the platform

39:56the moment where people are going to get their credit card to watch the game it's like honestly crazy it's 15 minutes before the game and 15 minutes after the game like after the beginning of the game so every strategy that you can have throughout the week and so on is just going to plan the seeds in someone's brain okay on Saturday at 8 p.m. I'm just going to get the subscription and we were maybe hoping for a bit more consistency with like weekly shows original programs and so on and I would say one the third one is that what people actually ask for it's a marketing tool and not only like a tech issue let me explain last year we had not complains but many demands about the fit quality itself like one of the top rank question was when are I going to get to UHD or like 4k feeds I want the quality to be better and so on and when you then look at the

40:59numbers in terms of people actually looking at the games people were watching it on their like phone tablets or like on the browser so we knew for a fact that a very small portion of them can actually support 4k but like in their minds they have like the Netflix standards 4k okay we need it so we were also trying to learn to learn like the demand from the fan and what is actually like the reality of the of the platform and like as a key learning we now have like the 4k feeds on all the 10 biggest games of the season on the platform so I think we are like approaching a moment where we we we understand more from the fans and I think the exciting part of the season too is also because we are the only broadcaster of Ligant last year we had been sports so we needed to be cautious on the bridges that we were building between Ligant and Ligant Plus because otherwise

42:04we were like putting one broadcaster above the other now on season 2 we can maybe be a bit more creative in terms of linking the fan base trying to make some bridges between fantasy the Ligant and everything and honestly when you like as we're saying when you look at data and what you can do with them I think we're really at the beginning of exploiting them so that's also an interesting one for the season 2. Cyprian on terms of the therefore we mentioned it to talk about piracy briefly there are you having to therefore because from what I can understand with the increase in pricing and just even though you've got you've got a reason to justify the investment because you know euro for euro it's still the best package out of any of the major leagues across euro if you can combine and compare that market by market what are you having to do on the piracy front to to to

43:06minimize the impact because by everything that we're seeing it's it's only getting worse and more difficult to challenge and obviously one of the reasons to go with a lower price point was also to make it more appealing for those that don't want to be heavily I'm spending a lot of money on these types of things even if the deal is better than they would be getting in you know Italy and Spain and other markets they don't really care about that enough unfortunately so how are you how are you tackling that specifically yeah I think that's a very good point I was saving all the elements for this question Nick sorry Chris and now I would say like the first big one was last season everything that we've done to like to regain the trust of the users if anything was that on the first season of the cycle so when it was on dayzone and being sports a lot of complaints were like on the price and so on and when you went on social media like for a big PSG against parseye game everybody that was complaining about the price you looked at the comment on X or like Facebook

44:11everybody was like okay here is a good deal you can just watch it for free on the pirate things last year and because we made like not only a prize fund that's way lower but also the whole communication about this is not our channel this is yours because it's the channel of the clubs and since you're a fan of the clubs it's also belongs to you last year every time someone was asking for like a pirate link on social media all the comments were like listen man like for 15 euro just just go on the platform by subscription and just like make an effort for your club so I think the first one was kind of a as we're saying the communication itself because the biggest a thing you can do against piracy is just like lowering the price the second element is a technical one we've been working very closely with Delta Trey with the whole network in terms of what you can do technically speaking to prevent piracy I won't dive into too much detail but we had like

45:12some very late night calls with the CEO of Delta Trey looking at tokens refresh and so on to be sure that pirates were blocked the right way even sometimes we had too many false positives so we had to reverse back so that was showing that we had some some goods ecosystem and the third one and I think it refers to what we're saying about everything is getting worse globally and not just in France I think it's legal actions and as part of the one of the big reform that was signed at the assembly in France a couple of months ago the ppl low anti piracy is a big chunk of it so the idea is also to work closely with like the governments on the the means and the tools that we're going to have to block those websites so honestly I would say still a major issue but it's also a issue for CanalPlus and any other Godcaster but at least I think we managed to crisis that's

46:17happened like one one year and a half ago where everybody was like I'm not paying 40 euros for subscription when I can buy your ip tv box that's costing me like 50 euro a year so still ongoing process but I think we're making good progress the last thing I kind of want to wrap up here on the Sabrina is almost now going backwards in the sense of you sort of mentioned that there is a financial benefit to working with broadcast distribution partners you've got the D to C relationship now you've got that positive experience working directly with fans and fans now have a positive experience working with you but there also is the benefit of the financial side of working with broadcast partners have you guys even begun to start to think about what that process looks like if in the future you do go back to a more broadcast focused strategy like do you still want to hold on to some of those D to C elements the benefits you're getting from the data side how do you manage fan expectations where they they've known you as the one stop shop that they can go to like have

47:19you guys even started to think about what that looks like I don't want to say departure strategy but how you are media rights strategy would perhaps change now that you've already engaged this far down the road with D to C yeah I think that's a very good point and to be fully transparent it's something that obviously is considered internally I would say we are not trying to anticipate too much on that for a very simple reason like I don't think there is one person at LFP or like anywhere in France that can tell you what will happen next season the season after and so on what I can tell you for a fact is that with our new CEO Olivier that arrived like two months ago he sees League 1 plus as like the real strategy of LFP media like we've worked so hard on building everything from scratch that it's now also the moment where you can gather the benefits when you can make more revenues more money out of it and so on and obviously this strategy has

48:24been validated by the club's president from the beginning that being said obviously like we're also very rational and business wise if at some points there is like a big offer on the table and we're not just a media business we're also a football league so if some options will make more sense for the club's president we will obviously consider them but I would say the two elements that I try to think of are the first one the more League 1 plus is growing the better the situation will be when when and if someone comes in and say okay I want to buy the rights so no matter what happens the success of League 1 plus will give will get us in a very good position and the second element is that maybe what can happen is not switching back to a traditional pay TV model but maybe having like an exclusivity on distribution and that could be kind of an in-between scenario where maybe you get

49:32a minimum guaranteed and you get a red moussure and so on so I think by all sense League 1 plus and all the work that we're doing is just enhancing the options that we could get in the future and if you compare the situation that we're at today to one year and a half ago where you had your main broadcaster that didn't want to pay anymore you had a very complicated market with no broadcasts offer on the table I think it's just like the work that we're doing is just going to get us in a better situation artist I mean look Chris I think the reality here is that anyone who's been following this knows that and I don't think LFPs pretended to do this either this is the this is the future and this is the only path of travel and this is forever and it's going to make them the biggest league in Europe in three years time but it had to be done because of the circumstances that were served to Cyprian's point if they get it all right and they can grow their

50:36audiences and prove out and create the ultimate kind of business case to present to plus streaming platforms and broadcasters about what the possibilities are what they can bring as a ready-made subscription style audience to the table that makes the conversation in future writes windows are much easier and tangible conversation rather than the speculative version you'll get when a broadcaster will tell you they're bringing you audiences and and and go down all that those ebbs and flows of conversations so I don't think anyone this day and age is sort of naively saying that oh that this this is going to be the great solution because the reality is the stuff that we've covered for ages Chris is like yes this works at the tier one end you know Cyprian has talked about that first million subscribers it was serving the audience they were they were there they were ready they were ready to subscribe once something like this was brought to the table but we know through consumption trends that there's all that audience underneath that no matter what you offer they just

51:38won't take their next step and that's the bit that's left on the table and what the LFP will have to work out in the future is how do they make sure that they tap into that economy and opportunity and that's where the broadcasters and platforms clearly will come in whether it be through you know coming up with a writes a new write strategy or approach that is appealing for them enough to have more games visible for free to where whilst really still having a really powerful and valuable OTT proposition or selling the product as it is and letting the broadcaster and platform do what they want with making some games available free to wear and some available in front of a paywall and some of it behind behind them behind the whole subscription framework so it's it's definitely I don't want people to think like oh we're saying it's all roses I don't think Cyprian you're saying that either you know it's been a challenge but now after a few months into the season a few weeks into the season I guess I think my sense of it is that this is now the

52:43time where you at LFP know where things stand because the start of the year two season was always going to be the litmus test of how much of a boost would you get from year one to two how many people would you lose and now you guys can see what the future looks like and now can model out what you need to do next yeah definitely and I think it was also like the moment where you you start having like year to year comparison so it also gives you a lot of things to navigate through it also like we change some things on the platform technically speaking with our partner so it's now also the exciting part where you're just not like under pressure of the timing of the launch and so on but you have like a couple of months to to think about the strategy and to think about the product and yeah obviously this season is going to stay only one place and whatever happens next if it's season three of league one place we're like one more year about experience and so on with the grades if at some point someone wants to put one billion on the table it would be also welcome

53:48absolutely well separate and I really appreciate you coming on and having this in-depth conversation with us like I said you could probably tell by Nick's enthusiasm the questions we have been talking about this for quite some time so to be able to talk to the man behind it all it's been a really insightful conversation we really appreciate you being a part of this series yeah thanks a lot guys honestly a very interesting conversation and as we were saying when we prepared everything Chris and I think after a couple of months a lot of people wanted to hear of the league one plus story but we had no not much to say so now it's really good to have like a one year of feedback and to be able to share the league one plus story so thanks for you, Nick. Thanks thanks so much Cyprian I just next time I'm going to ask you about the international side I so much more to ask you but we ran out of time so I'll say that for another conversation thank you perfect