With a one-year delay due to the pandemic, in 2021, more than 70 percent of Mexicans claimed to have watched the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Regarding this remarkable confirmation of interest, it is necessary to analyze the numbers of Claro Sports and YouTube’s joint broadcast with more than 120 million hours of Olympic content viewed with more than 600 million reproductions of that material. It is logical that Claro Sports and YouTube will repeat the experience with Paris 2024, which will start next July 26 until August 12.

The partnership between the two major platforms is an example of what we are talking about when we talk about the new sports television. The next Olympic Games will be spread across stadiums, arenas and also along the Seine River. Paris 2024 will take place in the streets of the city. The mobility of the competition is the same as it can now be for sports fans who can connect to their favorite content on smartphones, tablets, Smart TVs and computers. The new sports TV meets the fan wherever they are. In the case of Paris, there will be 392 competitions in 32 sports disciplines.

Claro Sports brings to YouTube the Paris 2024 Olympic Games from the regional rights granted by the International Olympic Committee. We can locate in Mexico the location of the agreement and its technological deployment and coverage, but we will see with these data that this alliance connects almost the entire continent:

– 16 Latin American countries will have access to Paris 2024 through Claro Sports: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.
– Coverage 24 hours a day, seven days a week; with 50 live competitions daily, up to 10 simultaneously.
– More than 2,000 on-demand videos with highlights, clips, medals, analysis and more, all on Claro Sports’ YouTube channel.

The reach that YouTube allows for the coverage of events does not require metrics for confirmation. It is one of the platforms that guarantees global reach when sports organizations seek to expand their fan base. Its media partners can also offer that vision, because as Claro Sports says there will be “full coverage, live and totally free”. In a way, YouTube is one of the new versions of what we can understand by “free TV”.

On that condition, different business models and monetization through memberships, subscriptions and advertising revenues may appear. But the Olympism fan receives an indisputable version of free TV when he connects to YouTube.

YouTube’s influence globally is beyond dispute, let alone if there are numbers to prove it. It is second responsible for the Internet’s downstream traffic with 11.6 percent of total downstream. First is Netflix with 14.9 percent. YouTube is also third in the upstream with 5.9 percent. That is, with content uploaded by creators and users.

According to other data from Sandvine, video accounts for almost 66 percent of global Internet consumption, a sidereal distance from other categories such as marketplace, gaming and social networking, which barely exceed 5 percent of traffic.

To understand how the consumption of sports content of the new generations is organized -something that must be understood as dynamic trends, where preferences overlap, coexist and are not substitutes for each other-, these insights from The Gen Z Football Report are interesting. They are not data focused on YouTube, but they allow us to reach conclusions about what this platform means in this moment of the sports industry.

– 49 percent of young sports fans turn to YouTube regularly at least once a week to watch sports content.
– YouTube is the top video-watching destination for most digital natives. 76 percent say they do so because it offers them a wide range of choices about their interests.
– 93 percent of Gen Z members have watched a video longer than 20 minutes in the past month. Docuseries are among those preferences because, in soccer, they are the content that allows them to be informed and learn (I add: docuseries are what TV news was to their grandparents).
– 59 percent of Generation Z turns to short video in apps to discover content they will watch later in their longer versions.
– According to the research, 59 percent of Gen Z soccer fans watch short-form highlights, second only to the full match (85 percent) and ahead of extended highlights, which are 50 percent of their interests.

YouTube represents what can be understood today as television. Total TV. The assembly of the personal menu is what defines this TV that has traits of the televisions of all times. It can be live or on demand. The sports industry, which has many points of contact with others in the world of entertainment, has in YouTube several platforms within a single one that reaches the user as he is interested in. Mainstream media competing for the acquisition of rights and creators of independent content, or even homemade aesthetics, coexist on the platform. Users’ tastes shape this new television: my YouTube is not the same as the one my neighbor watches.

The platform has long ceased to be a mere repository of old videos and programs already broadcast. It is multiplatform. Sports content is diversified into lives, creators who react to other content, match reports with or without images, extreme journalism, extended highlights, normal highlights, historic matches, unforgettable moments of anger and fights from TV sports shows, trailers of docuseries, podcasts, short vertical videos, programs produced by youtubers and summaries of those same programs. And everything that is audiovisual content and has not been added to this description.

According to Google data, 79 percent of sports fans go to YouTube because “the platform has content they can’t find elsewhere.” The new sports TV changes all the time, but YouTube is a concrete reference for finding relevant content that interests us. We know that if something was interesting and unmissable in the world of sports, YouTube will surely have it.