Live Sports & Monetization: Public Service Broadcasters Thinking Outside The Box
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Although premium sports rights may be slipping beyond reach for Public Service Broadcasters, the trend towards segmented rights owned increasingly by leagues or individual athletes offers further opportunities. There is growing scope for aggregating less costly packages, including highlights or clips from premium sports, as well as niche events.
With live sports broadcasting evolving rapidly around the world, this series of nine articles aims to analyze the implications, challenges and opportunities for Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs) in the context of changing business relationships, competitive dynamics and viewer expectations.
Three broad trends have emerged. One is that leagues, sports and even individual athletes or players are exerting increasing control over TV and streaming rights. Secondly, niche sports are growing in importance because of their collective global audiences and ability to generate significant revenues through subscriptions, pay per view and targeted advertising. Third, there is rapid growth in viewing of many women’s sports, which collectively is the fastest growing segment.
Cutting across all three of these themes is demand for more personalized packages, which has impacts for workflow at various levels as it shapes the nature of content produced, as well as how it is distributed.
At the same time, PSBs, in keeping with the video services business as a whole, still face traditional challenges which are evolving and have implications for workflow in the live sports context. High up that list comes live sports piracy, which is exerting a severe toll on the sports themselves. France’s Ligue 1 revealed recently that it had lost nearly €400 million revenue, close to the rights’ entire value. In Spain LaLiga has totted up losses approaching €700 million a year. In the US it is even worse, with the NFL estimating annual losses to piracy of $28 billion.
An underlying message is that as these themes take hold, the different threads of the content lifecycle are increasingly interwoven. While once broadcast transmission could be regarded as a black box independent of the content, viewer and business model, now they are becoming inseparable.
That message is especially relevant for this feature, which is examining implications for workflow of these trends in live sports broadcasting. The workflow itself must take account of the evolving business models, legal aspects and relationships with the various components of the ecosystem, including other service providers, rights holders, the sports and viewers themselves.
Getting Granular
The live sports sector has come to dominate broadcast workflows from production through editing and packaging, to final distribution and consumption. Some of the trends are not unique to live sports but are being driven by them because of the high value, and also the state of flux the field is in, as business models change seemingly by the day in line with viewer expectations.
The effect of live sports is to magnify or accelerate trends across broadcasting, including personalization, targeting for ad revenue, rising content piracy, and incorporation of business models into workflow. Adding to this there is the need to reach more and more platforms, defined in terms of screens and access categories, spanning social media as well as streaming services.
This means that on the one hand, workflow has to ensure viewers can access content wherever they are and whenever they want, on any social media or other platform they want to use. This applies especially to clips and highlights, while the big screen retains its primacy for viewing whole matches and major events, as well as extended highlights.
At the same time consumers are being lured towards services that meet their own demands and are built around their own chosen sports or events, while being more averse than they have been in the past to paying for content they do not want. According to Deloitte, one third of fans seek greater personalization and that number is growing.
This is leading to growth in micro-subscription models serving highly segmented micro-audiences, with direct ramifications for workflow. While the ultimate destiny of such models is almost an extension of pay per view, taking granularity down to individual users, in the first instance it is based around interest and community groups, dovetailing with changes in the content itself. There is growing interest in the personalities involved and their lifestyles, both behind the scenes and away from their sports altogether.
This will also introduce changes in revenue generation including targeted advertising, as well as the subscriptions themselves. That goes beyond the static or dynamic perimeter boards that currently carry brand advertising around grounds, as well as traditional 30 second spots, as well as pre, mid and post rolls. There will be scope for more subliminal advertising associated with individuals or mini documentaries offered optionally within or alongside more traditional footage of events or matches.
The Effect On PSBs
The trend towards micro-subscriptions is taking hold across the online services sector generally and not just video, and may seem of less direct relevance to PSBs. But since a growing amount of content is viewed on social media platforms, above all YouTube, this is where PSBs now need to make content available and ensure it is highly visible to audiences across all demographics.
Research from various regulators, such as Ofcom in the UK, has found that until now only a small proportion of video consumed on such services is supplied by PSBs, much less than on TVs in the living room. It is true PSBs have their own portals, such as BBC iPlayer, but while these remain important outlets, the reality is that YouTube especially is at the fulcrum of competition with other sources.
Workflow needs to be optimized for this multi-platform nature of distribution, as well as for the growing consumer desire to personalize and curate their viewing. Traffic management is a key issue to ensure that content is delivered at the right times to the right platforms, with avoidance of conflicts. The latter has become a growing issue for live sports coverage as the number of events covered has proliferated, and more recently as individual events become laced with multiple options, such as alternative views and ancillary content relating to participants, or even spectators at an event.
Helping Hands
This can become unmanageable without major restructuring of workflow around content hubs organized in a hierarchical basis that makes it easier to map individual service or consumer packages to the structure of the required assets. There are a growing number of tools and packages available to help reorient workflows around hierarchical content hubs.
It begins with content creation, a growing amount of which now comes from third parties in the case of ancillary content. But PSBs also face increasing demands for origination around lower tier events especially, which can only be met by automation. Efforts to automate production of sports content for lower leagues, particularly the video as opposed to audio elements, have been ongoing for years, and so here too various vendors have piled in with offerings.
Some form of AI features in just about all these products, involving tracking both the field of play and audiences or surroundings, as well as contribution of streaming for further processing or analysis. The streams may at this stage be captured for tactical analysis by the teams or participants themselves, which is becoming an increasingly important part of the overall exercise. This is another example of synergy occurring between aspects of sports video production that were previously entirely separate.
Some of these AI-based systems automate generation of highlight clips and immediate replays of significant events, available on demand, or for inclusion in personalized packages, or even as part of a main broadcast where relevant. Indeed, such packages compete on the range of content they can generate on top of, or around, the ongoing stream, as well as on the ability to incorporate that easily within existing workflows.
There are entry level packages pitched at broadcasters, service providers, or teams themselves, offering an affordable entry into automated and advanced video production around smaller events where budgets are more restricted. This is an aspect into which we will dive deeper when discussing niche sports angles in the last three articles of this series.
Automation
Many of the challenges can be addressed more readily by moving at least some of the production and storage to the cloud, as many PSBs have already done. This usually involves staging some of the processes in one of the major public clouds, in combination with on premises systems in various configurations.
While there is a lot of focus on automation, there are still important manual processes involved, for compliance, quality control and some editing functions, which can at this stage at best be only partially entrusted to AI. However, the workflow involved in manual checking or editing of content can itself be automated and is increasingly being.
For example, raw footage of production content, including press conferences, and interviews by sidelines, as well as the matches themselves, can be selected automatically for transmission to the required locations or individuals. Such destinations may either be pre-selected or determined from the content itself. The process is likely also to involve transcoding, reducing bandwidth consumed to manageable levels.
This handoff between automation and manual action carries over to postproduction as well. At this stage, messages often have to be sent to a variety of people, alongside provisional final cuts of the footage. The system or portal can be set to send messages automatically to relevant people who need to review the cut and perhaps make final edits. These recipients can be predefined, but with flexibility to cater for varying availability or rotas.
Automation can also intermingle with human editorial actions over aspects of content generation and selection. This will often involve analyzing large volumes of live data, so not surprisingly machine learning enters here by translating raw footage into information or actionable insights.
This can be direct extraction of dynamic statistics, such as movements of players, or crowd reactions measured on an aggregate basis, which could be volume of sound or mass gestures. It can also include more subtle, almost subjective, insights, such as changes in audience mood resulting from the ongoing play in the absence of clear immediate events such as goals scored or players sent off.
There is growing interest in identifying emotions, or the changes in these, both among individual players or athletes and crowds. It may be that sections of a crowd are of interest, such as away fans at a football match who tend to be segregated for obvious reasons. Their reaction to an event will often be in stark opposition to those of home fans, but occasionally, as in reaction to some stadium announcement perhaps, may be more in sympathy.
This ability to dig deeper than the score and enrich coverage of an event requires recognition in the workflow, so that producers are ready and able to adapt coverage accordingly if that is appropriate, if only to home in on a section of the crowd or event. It is another example of convergence between workflow, content and production, with live sports at the apex.
Whether or not they approve of these changing cultural dynamics, PSBs have little choice but to embrace them inside their workflows if they are to survive, and hopefully thrive.
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