What is your role and what does it entail?

As the Senior Business Manager for the Sport department, I’m responsible for the all the business functions of the team, predominately the contracting and budgets for our sport productions and acquisitions. This also includes working on the business case development for sports rights opportunities and negotiating these rights deals. I’ve been at Paramount for 11 years now. I first came onboard when we got the Big Bash cricket and have seen plenty of change in that time with the launch of Paramount+, with our football coverage as a key pillar of that.

What do you love about your role and what are the challenges in your role?

The best thing about my role is how broad it is. Sometimes it’s finance and budget heavy, then we’re working with Programming and Sales to finalise scheduling and the next I’m switching into contract and legal mode, whether that’s on a talent contract or a rights agreement. Plus, in my role I get to work with every department within the organisation, so I feel like I get a complete understanding of the business and not just limited to one area. The challenges I think are resources, as we are a pretty lean team that produces a lot of content, and navigating the global business for larger sport deals and the time that takes, especially with the tight turnaround times we often face.

Paramount just signed a historic multi-year, multi-platform media rights deal with Football Australia. What is involved in creating a deal like that and what does it mean for our business?

A major deal like this is often months, and in this case over a year, in the making. We first need to pull together the business case for the deal and this requires input from many people around the business – we develop mock schedules with Programming, ratings predictions with Insights, revenue predictions from Sales, production cost estimates from my team – and I work as the conduit between all stakeholders here, providing the necessary information needed to develop this.

Based on these inputs we then figure out how much we can bid on the rights in collaboration with the Finance and Strategy team. Once we’ve submitted the bid and are (hopefully) selected as the preferred partner we then need to negotiate the rights agreement and so we then work with legal, notably our brilliant GC, Stuart Thomas. Stuart and I work closely to review and finalise the agreement in collaboration with Adam Cush and Phil Mooney, working back and forth with the sports body to close this out. This Football Australia deal was particularly complex as it had rights that flowed not only from FA, but from FIFA and AFC under the one deal, so this added more challenges than normal in getting this contract all negotiated and finalised. This deal is great for the network, and in particular Paramount+, as its solidifies our investment in football and secures us as the home of Australian football long term, with plenty of exclusive content for P+ to drive subs growth. Plus, it includes a major international tournament – the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Brazil.

When it comes to Sport, what sets Paramount apart from its competitors? What do we do well?

We are uniquely positioned as we have the one production team that produces our all-sport coverage regardless of what platform it’s on across broadcast, 10 play and P+. So that presents us with good efficiencies and the opportunity to promote all our platforms. Think how we use our FTA A-League broadcasts to promote the rest of the weekend’s coverage on P+. That’s quite different to many of our competitors who are either limited to one platform, either free or pay, and are therefore competing with each other (like Seven and Fox on the cricket or AFL), or if they do have both free and pay platforms in their ecosystem they actually operate with two different production / talent teams (like Nine and Stan for the Olympics). So this ‘one house’ approach allows us to leverage all our offerings across the full ecosystem, with the same talent team for a consistent viewer experience.

Who is the Daniel Favaloro outside of Paramount? What do you love to do on weekends?

My life outside of work is taken up wrangling my two young sons, who are 3.5 years and 18 months old. A full time job in itself! So the weekends are dominated by family time at the park and play dates with the cousins. But come summer you’ll find me playing cricket each Saturday afternoon, my favourite sport, and where I’m heavily involved behind the scenes as President of the club.