BT Sport and Ocean Outdoor partner for big-screen Champions League clips
Soccer -
17 Feb 2021
BT Sport, the UK pay-television operator, has entered into an exclusive digital content deal for top-tier European soccer with Ocean Outdoor, a big-screen development firm.
Ocean Outdoor will be able to broadcast next-day highlight clips from the knockout stages of Europe’s prestigious Uefa Champions League - which BT Sport holds live and exclusive UK rights to - on a number of digital advertising screens across the UK’s biggest cities.
The partnership starts today, with the firm showing a series of minute-long clips from last night's round-of-16 match between England’s Liverpool and RB Leipzig of Germany on 16 advertising screens in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The deal runs until the end of the 2020-21 Champions League season, with similar plans being made for games from the quarter and semi-finals, as well as for the final itself on 29 May in Turkey.
The partnership, Ocean Outdoor’s first with BT Sport, involves each set of highlights sitting alongside a promotion campaign for the broadcaster’s Watch Together feature, part of the BT Sport mobile app’s Matchday Experience.
As well as BT Sport’s coverage of the Champions League, Ocean Outdoor also has partnerships in place with Uefa, for its Euro 2020 national teams competition later this year, the All England Lawn Tennis Club for the Wimbledon Championships, and Team GB for the rearranged Tokyo Olympics in July and August this year.
Ed Cracknell, BT Sport’s head of marketing, said: “It has been fantastic to work with Ocean to create this innovative way to showcase some of the content and innovative features on the BT Sport app.”
Kevin Henry, Ocean Outdoor’s head of content and sponsorship, added: “The extension of BT Sport’s Uefa coverage onto our screens launches a superb summer of sport for our large format portfolio, bringing the best championships to even wider audiences.”
BT Sport holds exclusive Champions League rights up until the end of the 2023-24 season, and will be paying £1.2 billion ($1.56 billion) in total over the course of the next three seasons.
In past seasons, it has allowed its Champions League final coverage to be made available free-to-air, and also to be shown on YouTube.
