Spark Sport is a premium live and on-demand sports streaming service in New Zealand. Launched in 2019, the platform offers a wide range of live and on demand content such as New Zealand Cricket, English Premier League, England Cricket, NFL, MBA and more. The streaming provider also streams channels such as NBA TV, MUTV, LFCTV, EDGE TV & TAB Trackside, through which sports content is available to viewers around the clock.
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Spectator sports are most engaging when audiences don’t know what’s going to happen next. For the sports broadcasting industry itself, the playing field in which they operate has undergone many exhilarating changes over the last few years. In many cases, these have been accelerated and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
As stadiums and venues that were once packed with excitement and atmosphere have been forced to close, we’ve witnessed the increasing significance of over-the-top (OTT) platforms becoming the digital delivery system for the enjoyment and adrenaline sports fans around the world have been missing.
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There have been many, many words written recently about remote production, indeed the wider world of remote working generally, spurred on by significantly increased use during the pandemic. But remote production didn’t suddenly spring up overnight, either as a concept or reality.
Let’s step back first. We’ve seen huge growth in the use of IP bonding across sports, especially in the last five years: from single-camera streaming to complex, multi-camera productions, often on the move. From the Rugby World Cup, where LiveU technology was used not only to gather content but also as a disaster recovery solution by ITV Sport, to the FIA World Rally Championship, Austrian football and facilitating coverage of the Spanish lower leagues, the list goes on.
Accompanying that growth has been the rise of remote production. Why is that? What are the benefits?
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Supponor enables rights owners to maximize the value of live broadcast Sports & Entertainment events through world-leading end-to-end Virtual Advertising solutions, allowing partner and brand communications to be targeted and customized for each specific audience segment. Steve Plunkett, Chief Product Officer at Supponor, talks about the challenges brought by the Covid pandemic, and how the company helped its clients move to remote delivery at breakneck speed.
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How Sports Venues are Adapting and Thriving Despite the Effects of COVID-19
Energy, rivalry and victory—the trifecta of elements for an exciting match, no matter the sport. Over the recent years, these aspects have been key components in the sports venue playbook of innovation as they were faced with having to transform the way they did business. Their goal? To create an immersive, energetic and memorable experience that would not only entice fans to attend events in person but also leave them looking forward to coming back again.
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Latest EVS VIA and Media Infrastructure solutions underpin BLAST’s new mobile esports production flypack
BLAST the global esports media network delivering world class entertainment experiences, has selected EVS’ market-leading VIA and Media Infrastructure solutions as the backbone of its new esports production flypack. The mobile solution is designed so that BLAST can produce its own live gaming events in-house. With the Covid-19 lockdown impacting mass gatherings, the flexibility of the EVS live production workflow is enabling the esports giant to put on online-only events instead.
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The global video streaming industry is a multi-billion-dollar market that’s enabled streaming services of every size to succeed. Yet, with great success comes new risks and responsibilities. The rapid growth of streaming services means that they are now not only home to high-value content but, in some cases, data from millions of customers. Cybercriminals now see streaming services as a treasure trove and are eager to mine premium content and users’ data including, customer payment details, email addresses, physical addresses, and names. Inevitably, the more successful a streaming service is, the more personal data it has, which makes it an increasingly attractive proposition to cybercriminals because they have a greater surface area to attack. Growing pains in these organizations can lead to an increase in cyberattacks that take advantage of the vulnerabilities specific to OTT platforms and technologies.
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The session will explore how esports can capitalise on this growth as it moves into the future, examining the business models of esports teams and leagues, how broadcasters, streaming services and other rightsholders can develop esports audiences further along with new sources of revenue. It will also look at how esports leagues can leverage remote production and cloud-based production models to increase their flexibility and scale output, while still maintaining professional production standards. The presentation will show Esports was already a live broadcast powerhouse in waiting, but because of COVID-19 and lockdown the wait has suddenly become a lot shorter.
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Even before the COVID-19 pandemic began, esports was predicted to be a huge driver of growth for the gaming industry in 2020 and beyond. Now, with mainstream sports around the world on hold and millions of people around globe staying at home to help stop the spread of coronavirus, gaming and esports have become increasingly popular as a way to fill the empty hours of lockdown and isolation.
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