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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In May 2019, the League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational, set in Chinese Taipei and Vietnam, drew peak viewership north of 1.7 million. The massive audience watched in near real-time as G2 Esports claimed the title, knocking off Team Liquid 3-0 in the finals.
Production for the event was done remotely, thousands of miles away in Riot Games’ studio in Los Angeles. Via a mix of local internet providers in combination with Riot Direct, the company’s privately owned global internet network, video and audio HD feeds were sent from Asia to L.A., where the feeds were edited, finalized for broadcast and sent back to streaming and broadcast partners throughout the world.
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During this 80-minute recording of the session, leading video games and esports experts will help you better understand how traditional media is being complemented and disrupted by the rapid growth in competitive gaming.
Produced in association with Telstra and Telstra Ventures, discussions centre around how video games and esports content can help grow and engage audiences, the changing workflows for content creation and distribution, and how network demands, costs and regional complexity influence the production, testing and public release of games globally.
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[caption id="attachment_116826" align="alignright" width="288"] Yash Patel, General Partner at Telstra Ventures[/caption] When we announced back in 2018 that we had made an investment in the parent company of US esports team Team SoloMid (TSM), it raised a lot of eyebrows. It was a little different to our usual investments, plus esports was still seen as a niche interest and its participating teams not considered comparable to traditional sports franchises. But that perception has changed – today esports is a key growth area in the interactive media space. This trend can also be seen in another of our esports investments, Skillz, which in December became the first publicly-traded mobile esports platform. Skillz is poised to capitalise on the massive growth in mobile gaming, which it expects to more than double in value by 2025 to be worth $150 billion. It is planning new monetisation models and international expansion opportunities that will allow it to dramatically expand its addressable market. Skillz is democratizing esports for everyone. Traditional esports has always been associated with PC and console gamers and more hardcore, first-person shooter and Battle Royale games. But it turns out that mobile esports is a massive opportunity, magnitudes larger than PC and Console gaming and...
While in popular perception the esports market is centered around the twin loci of North America and Asia, Europe is fast becoming an esports hotspot. It accounts for almost one-third of all global esports revenues and is host to more than 70 million esports viewers. However, it remains far less homogenous and represents a far more diverse mix of countries and cultures than America and China
Europe’s rich and diverse games heritage traces back to the earliest days of games development, including some of the biggest titles in the business, ranging from Minecraft (Mojang, Sweden), through Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar North, Scotland), and on to the ubiquitous Candy Crush Saga (King, Sweden). It is unsurprising to see European developers amongst the first organisations that made esports popular, especially in the West. Amongst them are major players such as Germany’s ESL, which is now arguably the world’s largest esports organization.
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