Games without Frontiers: Streaming Sports and the Evolution of Digital Intermediaries

Abstract

As television has evolved into a global online medium, content owners from around the world increasingly rely on intermediary firms to program and manage their streaming platforms. Although such platforms feature the names of companies like HBO and ESPN, it has been the intermediaries that construct them, like BAMTech and NeuLion, that set the parameters of how audiences engage with streaming video. This article highlights the growth of intermediaries beginning in the 1990s, when media companies began to seek expert firms to help them put content online. Intermediaries, given their experience working in sports media, became experts in geolocation and audience analytics. As television has transitioned into an online medium, the leverage of the intermediary has grown with it, as reflected in Disney's recent purchase of BAMTech. The study of intermediaries, therefore, illuminates the contributions of an obscured but immensely influential party in the process of global television distribution.