Reinventing Sports Broadcasting For OTT

Alan Young, COO, Crystal tells Vinita Bhatia how broadcasters can increase the value of delivering sports content on OTT platforms using metadata and AI technology

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The combined international fan base of 20 English Premier League football teams exceeds a whopping 210 million people. Audiences of this size mean sports content is a highly lucrative business. A report from Deloitte India believes there is massive potential in the Indian sports market in particular, and this popularity is driving up advertising rates by as much as 15% on both television and digital platforms. In fact, when India faced Pakistan in the final of the Champions Trophy cricket tournament last June, a 30-second ad broadcast by Star Sports was rumored to cost nearly 10 million rupees ($155,267), around 10 times the normal price according to Reuters.

Despite this popularity, streaming sports content Over-The-Top (OTT) has always lagged behind traditional viewing, mainly due to latency issues which in most cases can cause a live OTT stream to fall behind by as much as 30 seconds. Technological advancements in OTT delivery and metadata, and the introduction of viable Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, are presenting a number of ways for sports content providers to attract audiences to OTT. By making the OTT experience more attractive to fans looking for additional ways to engage with sports, it is possible that OTT sports could offer value beyond that of live coverage.

CHANGE IN VIEWING HABITS 

The opportunity to successfully provide OTT sports content has not gone unnoticed, and many well-known internet brands are now looking to capitalise it. According to Business Insider, Facebook is willing to pay lots of money for sports, reflected in their reported bid of $610 million for the rights to the Indian Premier League (IPL), the most popular cricket league in the world. The social giant did lose out to Star India but was still the second highest bidder ahead of other internet players, including Amazon and Twitter.