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<\/p>\nThe BBC\u2019s director of sport Alex Kay-Jelski has insisted the broadcaster can still be \u201crelevant\u201d even if it does not have the rights to many live sports events.<\/p>\n
The growing cost of sports rights has led to the BBC losing live coverage of a number of events over the past decade including Formula 1, Six Nations matches involving England, the Open Championship, as well as this year\u2019s Boat Races and Commonwealth Games.<\/p>\n
Kay-Jelski told the Financial Times\u2019s Business of Football Summit: \u201cYou can still be relevant, you can still matter if you don\u2019t show the sport. No one out there can show it all. So, you just have to make sure you\u2019re in the conversation of the things that matter.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Kay-Jelski said the BBC is in competition with more than just traditional broadcasters such as ITV or Sky<\/p>\n
DIARMUID GREENE\/SPORTSFILE<\/p>\n
\u201cFor example, we have audio rights to Formula 1 but not video rights, but we still have reporting and live pages and digital video that draw in millions and millions and millions of people.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re all living in this very different media landscape now where most of us are seeing things first on our phone anyway, and we\u2019re all swiping on the same tiny little screen.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe BBC<\/a> might have thought, traditionally, it was up against ITV<\/a>, or Sky, or various other broadcasters. Well, guess what? We\u2019re not. We\u2019re in a race to not be swiped, up against people selling you holidays, or clothes companies, or two-for-one chicken breasts on sale from the supermarket, or football teams, or athletes.\u201d<\/p>\n Kay-Jelski has overseen a modernisation of the BBC\u2019s digital output which is aimed at new and younger audiences, involving social media influencers and other innovations, and he accepted it put some traditionalists\u2019 noses out of joint.<\/p>\n Some of these innovations are set to be seen in its coverage of this summer\u2019s World Cup and Wimbledon.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s OK if a lot of these innovations don\u2019t make everybody happy,\u201d Kay-Jelski said. \u201cIt\u2019s also OK if some of the traditional forms of whether it\u2019s media content or sporting content don\u2019t make people happy.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are too many millions of different types of fans out there to start living in fear and not trying things because you\u2019re worried about backlash.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been at the BBC coming up to a couple of years now and we\u2019ve tried lots of different things. Some of it is targeting areas of fans that I don\u2019t think we were necessarily serving that well before.<\/p>\n \u201cBut that doesn\u2019t mean that you\u2019re taking away other things that are really popular. Match of the Day is an example where we still have a linear television program that goes out at 10.30pm and there\u2019s millions of people that watch that and that\u2019s fantastic.<\/p>\n \u201cThat hasn\u2019t stopped us from then having digital-first clips, from going TikTok<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>-first on other things, from doing tactical analysis with the tactics correspondent in a slightly deeper way. All that stuff, it doesn\u2019t have to be liked by everyone; it just has to have a purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The BBC\u2019s director of sport Alex Kay-Jelski has insisted the broadcaster can still be \u201crelevant\u201d even if it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499421,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":["post-499420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}