He made this comment while presenting the competition's international data strategy at the recent SportsPro OTT Summit.
With such a dramatic shift in the broadcast landscape, rights holders will have to become experts in this new technology, which is why La Liga became the first major football competition to develop its own OTT service, LaLigaSportsTV.
"We ask two questions in our department. Who are our fans and how do they behave?" Franco said. "With our OTT platform, we are perfectly positioned to develop better knowledge of our users and how they consume sport, which can then be used to grow our audience."
LaLigaSportsTV is a multi-channel platform that was created to provide coverage of less-mainstream Spanish sports, rather than broadcast La Liga matches. In its first year, the service has streamed 1,145 live events and provided on-demand coverage from 35 different sports across smartphone, tablet, PC and Smart TV environments. In this time, it has accumulated 410,000 registered users.
To Franco, each of these users provides a unique data footprint that can help La Liga to improve its offering. "We have designed dashboards that show the location of every user, how many times they use the app per week, which sports they follow, how long they watch and which device they use," he explained, adding that all information is strictly anonymized.
"By sharing this insight with our marketing teams, we can then send notifications or recommendations for a specific match, TV service or event. This has been very effective."
Crucially, data from the OTT platform is combined with data from La Liga's many other digital platforms, including its website, mobile applications or games, in a single data lake.
( With inputs from IANS )