How to achieve the maximum reach for your sport and live events

IBC stand A.129

By: Liz McParland, Commercial Director for Contribution and Global Coordination, Globecast.

Broadcasting, especially sports broadcasting, is changing faster than a triathlete. 

That change affects not just the way that broadcasters interact with their consumers, especially across the ever-growing the number of online platforms available, but also their internal technology and the way they run their operations.  The winners will be those that manage to successfully transition from the old world to the new world without losing their existing customers on the way.

Broadcasters, content creators and rights holders have to be able to maximise the monetisation of their content across multiple platforms and devices. There are significant geographical and generational variations in viewing patterns; content and commercial models that work on one set of devices in one market won’t necessarily on other devices or in other markets.

Sport is a key example

Let’s take the live sports market as a key example. Sports broadcasting is a highly dynamic and growing sector. As the cost of sports rights continues to increase, maximising the monetisation of that content becomes ever more important. The growth in the amount of material that has to be acquired and delivered to feed all these platforms – linear TV in multiple formats/resolutions, live streaming, pop-up channels, VOD packages, real-time creation of highlights for social media and the ability to exchange and sell clipped content – is very significant.

It’s here that a key technological shift – the gradual move to virtualised and cloud technologies, including cloud playout – comes into play. These increase flexibility and massively speed up time-to-market. This shift also facilitates the creation of integrated service suites from media services suppliers like Globecast.

Taking the live sports example – live events too – it’s now possible to aggregate multiple virtualised technologies into a single ecosystem. For example, this can allow a live feed to be treated in multiple ways to create content suitable for cross-platform use, in both real-time (crucially) or for use at a later date.

The live feed can be used for linear playout or to stream to live platforms of the rights holder’s choice, including social media, apps or websites. Using the same live feed, short or long form content can be manually or automatically clipped, edited, metadata attached and shared. For example, highlights clips can be shared quickly on social media to maximise viewer engagement or packages created for OTT platforms.

File-based content marketplace

All the file-based clipped content – short and long-form – should then be able to be made available on an easy-to-use content exchange platform, allowing content exchange between relevant parties, including the selling of that content.  This material has, of course, to be made available in multiple formats/different sizes – including at broadcast quality – and branded using customers’ brand guidelines. This should include the ability to archive existing content for the long term and making that content easily available to third parties – historical sports events being a prime example.

There’s no doubt that there are very significant content monetisation challenges, but technology is allowing us all to think differently. In fact, we have to think differently. Come and see us at IBC – stand 1.A29 – and we’ll answer any questions you have and we can discuss your options.