2024 predictions: The year of live sports monetisation with media-centric video delivery networks says Net Insight
By Jonathan Smith, Net Insight solution area expert.
2023 saw the live sports broadcasting landscape changing fast with increased competition among broadcasting and streaming players for content rights and further overall market consolidation. In 2024 content owners and rights holders will gear up the transition of their contribution and distribution models to the cloud in search of greater cost efficiencies at scale. Remote and centralised production alongside artificial intelligence (AI) will play a bigger role in empowering media organisations to drive more value from their live sports content.
Live sports is a huge part of content production, taking up 20% of all professional production hours (Caretta Research 2023). Producing and delivering super high quality live sports content swiftly, reliably, and on a large scale is non-negotiable. Media companies need the right network backbone to remain agile and ensure their live sports feed contribution and distribution are as efficient and seamless as possible to enable further monetisation.
However, we still see many media organisations still relying on generic IP transport workflows for their valuable contributed content. The next 12 months will see significant changes with a greater focus on innovation in software-defined transport networks that are media-centric in nature.
‘On-demand’ remote and centralised production
Research has revealed that over a quarter of broadcasters and platforms (36.5%) and sports organisations (35.3%) are deploying live production technology (Caretta Research 2023), and the cloud offers an appealing proposition for fast live feed contribution. However, adoption can be costly, especially when leveraging public cloud options that take the approach of permanent services running with very high resource utilisation.
To fully benefit from the power of remote and centralised production, media organisations need to have access to a robust and intelligent on-demand network on an event-by-event basis. This means that to transition from a CAPEX to an OPEX-based approach, media companies should be able to scale capacity up and down depending on demand and only pay for the resources they need when they need them. The flexibility to spin up and down quickly and seamlessly is critical when it comes to, for example, major live sports events when there is a short peak of usage.
Media-first video contribution and distribution networks
In 2024, we expect a growing number of sports rightsholders to shift from peripheral generic IP networks to fit-for-purpose primary media IP networks. Generic IP networks, by design, lack the fundamental principles needed for live sports video transport. This is a serious concern when transporting high value media content where you only get one shot to deliver to that primary distribution point.
Regardless of how good the content is, consumers don’t keep their eyes glued to it if the delivery quality and reliability aren’t exceptional. Media companies risk their monetisation potential if they don’t ensure their video feeds can be scaled across geographies and platforms in the right way.
While ARQ protocols solve the basic technical challenges of recovering packets over lossy transport, the next-generation software-defined networks that are purpose-built for media combine the benefits of hardware-defined networks and the cloud by leveraging media-centric foundations:
Observability
A software-defined network delivers monitoring metrics that provide insight into the video signal delivery every step of the way. End to end provisioning and monitoring brings cohesive visibility that enables broadcasters and media service providers to control their media delivery and ensure it is efficient, high quality, and seamless.
Protection
Live video delivery requires 100% uptime and 24/7 robust and redundant services that are not available by default over generic IP networks. A media-centric approach leverages the benefits of both ‘traditional’ broadcasting and modern cloud engineering to enhance the video feed protection and overcome reliability challenges.
Flexibility is key to managing the cost of IP network protection. With the right media-centric network, media companies can define the level of protection of different types of content on an input/output basis without having to make huge investments upfront.
Synchronisation
Synchronisation across contributed and distributed video signals is critical for ensuring that all destinations, regardless of their region, receive feeds at the same time. Synchronisation is also crucial for the betting industry, a key monetisation area for the sports broadcasting industry, as milliseconds of divergence can have a big impact on the real-time betting experience and overall fan engagement, potentially causing the provider financial and reputational damage.
Monetisation with a media-first approach
Smart content owners harness the power of media-centric delivery networks to distribute great quality video, including second-screen feeds, to new destinations flexibly, efficiently, and seamlessly. More importantly, they deliver video to destinations that make business sense when it makes sense.
Media organisations would often invest upfront to get their tech infrastructure ready to scale to new video takers without being able to scale down if needed, even if they only wanted to take on new destinations for a specific live sports event or if distribution to a specific market was not valuable or sustainable. Another traditional trap was to underinvest in the distribution, prioritising cost effective technology solutions to balance the perceived risk versus reward, often at the expense of quality and reliability.
A media-centric delivery network can provide the agility and scalability that industry players need when they need it and for as long as they need it. This means they are in control of their investment, benefit from cost transparency, and can experiment more with new destinations and live sports events. In other words, organisations can enjoy the flexibility of jumping on new market opportunities while delivering quality, but equally, the ability to ‘fail fast’ and remove themselves from markets that don’t bring business value quickly.
Key to success in 2024
The live sports market isn’t going to get any simpler; we expect fierce competition and market fragmentation to continue over the next 12 months.
Media-first transport networks that have been created specifically or overlayed to meet the requirements of media delivery, provide the quality, scalability, and agility industry players need to further monetise their live sports content, test different business models, and tap into new revenue streams.
Futureproofing today is the best bet for media companies that are game for success.