The National Football League and OverTier Expand Partnership

Sales EngagementNative & Programmatic Advertising

By STS News Desk On Oct 7, 2019

The National Football League and OverTier Expand Partnership

Multi-Year Agreement Significantly Broadens OverTier’s Rights to Operate NFL Game Pass Worldwide

The National Football League (NFL) and OverTier, a Bruin Sports Capital (Bruin) company, announced an expansion of their partnership for OverTier to operate NFL Game Pass, the league’s premium subscription OTT service. Since 2017, OverTier held the rights to operate NFL Game Pass in Europe. The new agreement now brings the service to a combined 181 countries and territories worldwide including Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, and South Korea.

NFL Game Pass offers all live NFL Games, NFL Red Zone, NFL Network and a deep catalog of original programming, documentaries, series and specials from the award-winning NFL Films. It is available across 11 platforms through connected TV, games consoles, web and mobile.

“We are excited to expand our partnership with OverTier to bring the NFL directly to fans around the world on their favorite viewing platforms with NFL Game Pass,” said Chris Halpin, NFL Chief Strategy & Growth Officer. “OverTier has a proven track record of innovation in Europe, and we look forward to unlocking significant potential across other markets.”

“We are delighted with the progress we’ve made with our NFL partners. Together we have built a detailed understanding of how to cultivate and super serve fans throughout Europe and have turned that into meaningful business gain with great long-term potential,” said Sam Jones, OverTier CEO. “We look forward to applying our unique model to these expanded global markets and with the league develop more fans and opportunities worldwide.”

Over the past two seasons, a suite of user-led product innovations delivered a more personalized viewing experience to more fans across more platforms and services in Europe than ever. There has been a meaningful growth in subscriptions to NFL Game Pass in Europe, total NFL GPE regular-season viewership was up 46% year-on-year (’17-’18), with average minutes per viewer increasing by 20% to 62 hours. Live Super Bowl viewership was up 33% year-on-year and playoff viewership up 30%. Mobile viewership increased by 26% year-on-year, while the total number of devices subscribers used to watch GPE increased by 33% (a GPE subscription allows up to five concurrent streams). Eight hundred million hours of content was streamed, representing over 91,000 years of content. The Android app was the highest rated of all sports subscription OTT services globally.

OverTier was created by Bruin to build and operate next-generation, sports, and entertainment direct-to-consumer streaming services. Bruin company, Deltatre, the global leader in sports media technology, provides the streaming platform technology. All marketing for OverTier on behalf of NFL Game Pass is led by Two Circles, a data-driven sports agency, with the support of Wavemaker, a full-service global media agency, both part of WPP’s GroupM.

Among the innovations to be rolled out in 2019 are:

Watch Around The World: NFL Game Pass subscribers will be able to use their subscription in any of the 181 territories it is active
Watch with RedZone: Thanks to new split-screen functionality, Season Pro subscribers will be able to watch NFL RedZone alongside one live game (outside of Europe).
Smart TV and PS4 apps: NFL Game Pass is accessible on more devices, including Samsung and LG Smart TVs
Film Sessions – Season 2:Across the 2019 season, 17 new installments of the hit series NFL Game Pass: Film Sessions will be available exclusively to NFL Game Pass International subscribers.