Strategic innovations in sports broadcasting and fan engagement

Beyond the popularity of short-form content and highlights grabbed on the go, sports broadcasting is predisposed to fluctuating pitches. As sports consumption revolutionises the globe, operators align digital strategies to match evolving habits. Understanding the paradigm shift in producing content and looking for technologies that fuel fan engagement helps sports broadcasters narrow down their target of consumers scattered across an array of devices.

Moderated by Dipesh Makwana, Business Development, Sports – APAC, Middle East, Vizrt, the speakers were Amill Lone, CEO, Saudi Sports Company; Danny Bates, Chief Operations Officer and co-founder, StarzPlay; Jamal Abdul Nasser Ali, Broadcast & Television Production Director, UAE Pro League; Maite Ventura, Managing Director, MENA, LaLiga; and Saeed Izadi, President, NEP – Singapore, India, Middle East.

Setting the conversation rolling, Makwana delved into the challenges faced in producing live sport content, and how common they are to the industry as a whole.

Budget constraints are a challenge for broadcast rights holders in every sport. “It is an ongoing concern,” began Saeed Izadi, President, NEP – Singapore, India, Middle East. “And the other is infrastructure. Everyone wants to produce sport the way it is made around the world, and we struggle with the infrastructure prevailing. In the MENA, connectivity between countries is also a problem, unlike Europe where moving between geographies is possible. Since there are no open borders here, logistics is a huge challenge.”

Latency, which in the satellite days was much smaller between the live game and the broadcast, is another issue. In a day and age of so many sports apps, the customer gets the goal within a second of it happening in the stadium.

“On OTT, you have a latency of up to 15-20 seconds,” said Danny Bates, Chief Operations Officer and co-founder, StarzPlay. “It’s never good to get your goal on your phone before you see it up on screen. We are trying to overcome that gap between the live game and the feed, between compression, feeding the CDNs across the region and between encryptions.”

As international leagues become more exorbitant with their pricing, monetising sports rights and properties becomes tricky. Affordability is possible if the numbers make sense. Even at a very low price, the best of rights are hard to monetise in markets such as North Africa.

One solution doesn’t fit all, and a multi-tiered approach with a variety of SVOD and AVOD offerings opens more opportunities to rake in the dollars. Another area is rights syndication. “Work with other regional broadcasters to see how we can maximise the rights potential, get more viewership and ultimately look at more sponsorship advertising around that,” remarked Amill Lone, CEO of Saudi Sports Company.

Increasingly, it is about taking games straight to an advertising model, even behind the paywall. “As a commercial company, pricing models are key and making sure those are right and flexible to give that access to the subscriber. OTT numbers recognised by bodies like Ipsos are very different to linear broadcast. But as the market evolves, that kind of research confirms the numbers, then it allows you to monetise the inventory properly,” said Bates.

In the UAE, with many expats, demographic dynamics also pose a challenge. “We are working hard to have English commentary for all our matches, producing tier programmes and trying our best to attract expats and make them feel that the league is for everyone,” said Jamal Abdul Nasser Ali, Broadcast and Television Production Director, UAE Pro League. “When we produce matches for the league, we strategise in a way to support our sponsors and have different fan categories and entertainment facilities available for, say, children in the stadiums.”

Getting younger audiences engaged in sport with newer technology and products is something that leagues regularly improvise on, to transform the viewing experience for those who watch on the go.

“From camera angles, graphics and scoreboard, to even changing the name of the competition to EA Sports, we have gone through an entire revamp over the last season and a half to create an immersive ambience and to stay closer to younger audiences,” stated Maite Ventura, Managing Director of LaLiga MENA.

Younger fans are more into technology and numbers, so the old ways of producing a match with standard cameras and normal running order may be dull and uninteresting, said Ali. “In the UAE Pro League, what we have done in the last three seasons is focus on increasing statistics and head-to-heads between the players. Earlier, we used very basic sets for information on-screen, but now we are integrating with service providers for more details by using AR to keep the match in touch with technology.”

Leagues such as LaLiga are breaking new ground with local projects, and it starts with the rights owners and the value they bring to their property. To create a hyper-local focus in the MENA, LaLiga has worked on 12 different projects over the last season with over 40 content creators across countries such as the UAE, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt, and has reached over 140m views.

A combination of what the rights holder does and how you can bring that to life with marketing and localisation on the ground adds momentum.

“We are doing a show with Serie A that we filmed across four countries to give young talent from the region the chance to go and play with the club. We do a lot of work around UFC, podcasts, local production, commentary, etc to carry that content to younger audiences,” said Bates.

Bringing influencers into an event such as at the recent Power Slap in Abu Dhabi assures visibility. Content is immediately captured and posted, building interest among the younger audience. Youngsters follow sport on social media, driving engagement within TikTok, Instagram, shorts and the like. Absorbing data from these stats and engaging younger fans on a social level raises involvement and the number of hits and views.

“We need to focus on implementing the kind of social media engagement that people in other regions are doing. That second-screen experience must be part of the offering, so developing content in the way that they start interacting with it, which leads then to them having to subscribe to more of your services and the values that you offer,” said Lone.

Bringing events to the audience engages them more with that content, changing their perspectives on a particular sport. Until recently, leagues and sport organisations didn’t approach the region seriously. With international associations having a local presence now, and local games happening in the UAE and in Saudi Arabia with the UFC and the NBA, the end customer or the end future fan of that league benefits hugely.

The Gen Zs want it portable, noted Izadi. “It is always vertical on their phone and so we decided to produce content in 9×16. It took us about two years to master the format and we launched it during the ICC Cricket World Cup. We had also incorporated readable graphics into the format and the response was amazing.”

With easy availability of sports entertainment products from anywhere in the world, broadcasters in the region must adapt to match the aspirations of a demanding consumer or be left behind.

“NEP has been one of the drivers of innovation and that’s part of the reason we are focusing on the Middle East now,” continued Izadi. “To supplement growth, we need technology-driven, innovation-driven companies to make the possibilities available in advance, to have the same standards that the UFCs and WWEs demand or will not negotiate. For example, in LIV golf the drones are tracked through goggles than traditional handheld control, and the enhancement it brings to the broadcast is incredible.”

With demand initiated by viewers, AR and VR drones and technology are an absolute necessity to keep the fan base engaged, agreed Lone.

“And that grows into the earlier point about the international rights holders who are coming in and catering to the local sports federations so that they grow as well and use technology to enhance offerings to get an engagement coming out from the local fan base.”

Going from UHD to 4K is describing it as four times better, said Makwana, but better pictures cost more to produce. With advances in technology, amortisation of assets becomes a lot easier and remote productions are made possible. If it has a return, and if it’s impactful enough to increase revenue and viewership and guarantee ROI, then you work towards that methodology, the panel agreed.

“We have seen production values go up with the use of AR,” said Ali. “As a league, we are between the TV rights holders and the production company, and we invest more to improve the production quality and value and our product.”

As sports investment in the region leapfrogs with the emergence of new regional players in the spectrum, technology holds significance. From a rights-holder perspective, leagues are competing with regional players and with other forms of entertainment such as the Power Slap. The key to differentiating businesses is from a technical perspective.

In the Middle East, like the rest of the world, viewership is the end goal while harnessing sports and advertising data. But how the viewership experience differs in this region is how much they watch on piracy, affecting monetisation.

LaLiga studies and data showed it was losing 700m euros a year to piracy. “We are now addressing this topic very strongly in the company. And if we all do not join forces, we will see a dramatic turnaround in the industry in a short term,” said Ventura. LaLiga is in talks with global tech companies and in the UAE, it is partnering with the Ministry of Economy, “to open an anti-piracy lab that can tackle the problem with dynamic blockings and in other workable ways”.

Companies such as Google who place a piracy ad on a YouTube page must have added pressure to realise their responsibility, added Bates. “Where’s the control from the guys who should have control? On a big ICC World Cup, India versus Pakistan, you’ll see six out of the top 10 apps in the Apple or Google store are piracy apps. At the recent UFC 308 event in Abu Dhabi, we did very well on the subscription side, but one Telegram feed alone showed 70,000 concurrent viewers in the UAE.”

“It is a huge challenge to the rights owners, because they need to monetise their product and they need partners like us to monetise their product. And if we cannot do that, it affects the whole economics of the business. 700m euros lost in a year is a huge number, and even those figures look conservative if you look at piracy in this region.”

Some of the Android boxes that exist in the market today open all the channels of all the products. But with a lot of support from the government and stringent measures being taken to address piracy, it is starting to make a real difference.

As local properties and leagues grow in importance and become aware of their production quality, they are changing their views on monetisation. A good example is how significant and impactful the Saudi league has been. Evolution is key to finding additional routes of monetisation, whether it’s free viewing of content or free viewing of matches, bringing more services to apps, merchandising, ticketing and all those other revenues that sit around the core broadcast revenue that can start to be capitalised on over time. Future-based plans yield results because they are built to attune to changing trends. “Our priority as a league is to regularly improve broadcasting facilities and the infrastructure in the stadiums,” said Ali.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have taken the next step in their sporting journey but there are other regions within the GCC and the Middle East that are growing fast and demanding better products. “When you see the NBA or the WTA coming to this part of the world, they expect the same standards and consistency they are used to in their home countries. We as NEP are investing heavily in the region and going to help broadcasters produce a better product,” said Izadi.

Growth in local sports federations, supporting regulators, making enforcements within the region to start bringing takedowns, and curtailing piracy will go hand in hand with everything that’s going to develop within the industry. Catering to the new generations and the unique nuances that define the young viewer who watches now and then will also play an important role in the coming years – in other words, maximising the use of content to provide monetisation opportunities while keeping fans engaged in real time.