It is expensive to be a sports fan nowadays, and honestly, it could be confusing too. The content-on-demand or streaming has grown over the years, as the number of fans watching live TV seems to be going down year by year. Still, the service providers have still not given up hope on their platform they have renovated their offerings to fight competition. While the viewers on TV have gone down, Live Sport on TV still has its own draw for the viewers. Since live sports is not something viewers can download it leaves no option but to catch the sports live on any platform.

Service providers have realized that and have hence been forced to purchase the necessary rights to distribute live sports data and content solutions. The sports scores feed has been the real differentiator and one of the main reasons why viewers keep coming back to the service providers. But if you look at it from the customers' point of view you will find that the service providers may be offering you a package wherein, they have included the sports content already, it would look like a good deal but it actually isn’t.

Live sports data providers now would not give you access to the content unless you are a subscriber to the service provider but what if you do not want to subscribe? How would you now get access to all the sports categories you need? A hardcore sports fan that follows a number of sports would now be restrained by access to the content.

If you look at its country-wise in Ireland specifically if you wish to get access to sports content you need to subscribe to up to 8 different subscriptions which would be a costly affair since this would definitely be added on top of your broadband services as well as the cost of your TV package. The love for sport may be there but would the fans be willing to spend that much to get access to their favorite content? This is one of the difficulties which service providers are facing today.

Further, Live streaming has not been limited to TV as well but the likes of Amazon Facebook, and Netflix have wanted to get into the lucrative live content sports provider industry. For example, when USPGA gave the European rights of the golf tournaments to a specific company you would need to subscribe to it to get access to the golf matches.

This basically creates a hurdle for some people to get access to sports content and they would be forced to take upon illegal measures to watch their favorite teams. Much like what the music industry is facing and has not been able to find a solution for it. The need of the hour is for the service providers to work together and provide a common access ground or share access so that fans would not face such an issue.

The service providers have a unique opportunity to partner up with the other content providers which would ease the burden on customers and also save the service providers from the risk of losing customers to other avenues and thus affecting revenue in the end.

What’s more? The smaller service providers would not be able to afford a license which leaves the bigger companies with the responsibility to provide license access to the other companies so that they can further distribute the data directly to the customers and it would act as a further income generator for the big companies.

Getting access to data can be a very challenging task in itself. Today a number of sports data providers also exist who can offer real-time sports data. One of the best in the market is Data Sports Group, with access to fast, accurate, and reliable data, customer engagement can be made easier.