Announcement

OVO Australia Broadcast Deal Announced

OVO Mobile is doubling down on coverage of badminton in Australia, becoming the official broadcast partner of Badminton World 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.  That 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.

Badminton is one of the world’s most popular sports.  More than 220 million people play badminton worldwide and it is particularly popular across Asia and especially China.  In Australia, badminton currently attracts more than 200,000 competitive players and hundreds of thousands of amateur and social players.

“OVO has demonstrated the potential for helping BWF reach an Australian audience of badminton participants and fans, with a mobile-first strategy that suits the way many of our fans are watching the sport around the world,” said BWF Commercial & Communications Director Owen Leed.

“We love that by bringing our events to OVOPlay and building on what Badminton Australia started last year, we are establishing OVOPlay as the Australian home of badminton.  Given this is one of the biggest sports in the world, that’s something to be proud of,” Owen said.

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 – making OVO by far Australia’s biggest broadcaster for the sport in Australia.

“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,” said OVO CEO, Matt Jones.

“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.

“We know BWF chose to partner with us because the Federation saw what we have achieved in such a short time with Badminton Australia, and recognised the potential audience we’re unlocking here in Australia.  They know that audience is choosing mobile as their first screen when it comes to tuning in and catching up on sport, and that a platform like OVOPlay – that puts the fans first – is the way of the future for reaching them,” Matt said.

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.

“Viewership on OVOPlay has grown month-on-month since we established the platform in 2017.  For sports like badminton, we’re attracting existing fans and creating a new community of enthusiasts simply by making content available and discoverable.  We’re excited to be able to deliver these fans for BWF,” Matt added.

OVOPlay can be watched as a live-stream or catch-up TV by downloading the OVOPlay app for iOS or Android.