2025: BT Media and Broadcast ponders whether this will be the year streaming live sports reaches the big league
By John Ellerton, BT Media and Broadcast head of futures and innovation.
The media industry news in 2024 was full of stories about the inexorable migration of audiences away from traditional broadcast TV to streaming services. Netflix’s viewing numbers continue to grow, now exceeding BBC One for the first time (The Telegraph, 14 Jan 2025), ITV-X has continued to grow strongly since hitting the one billion streams mark in just over four months since its launch, and the ‘mid-2030s’ date mooted for UK digital terrestrial TV switch-off gets ever closer.
But amongst all this, live big league sports keep drawing huge audiences to broadcast TV because right now it has a unique ability to deliver an immediate, live experience to an entire nation at once. Many media organisations are delivering sports over live streaming, and many have stories to tell as a result.
Most recently, the Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson fight on Netflix was good illustration of how live streaming to millions of viewers concurrently is very challenging indeed, with many viewers reporting streams buffering and freezing.
At the same time, it is notable that the Premier League has announced it is moving its distribution in-house from the start of the 2026/27 season, with industry analysts such as Paolo Pescatore suggesting that ‘this is the start of a very long journey towards a PremFlix type of service’ (Paolo Pescatore’s TMT Picks 25 November 2024).
Future of broadcast
Aside from content and stories, 2024 was also a year of technology development, with the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA) pressing ahead with standardising ultra-low latency live ‘DASH’ based distribution in the upcoming ISO/IEC 23009-1 6th edition. This was ably illustrated in an IBC Accelerator that we championed, and showcased live at IBC 2024, delivering a live feed over the internet to multiple synchronised receivers in less than two seconds glass to glass, arguably better than broadcast.
This is exciting because it shows the way to a future where viewers will be able to enjoy live sports as close to actually live as possible, no matter whether they’re seeing the results on social media, listening on the radio or watching on streaming.
There are still practicalities to be solved in implementation including the interaction with ad-tech, but we look forward to seeing the benefits being enjoyed by consumers globally as broadcasters and networks adopt this thinking.
Intense scrutiny
This is set against a backdrop of a far bigger question around the future of broadcasting. 2025 is a pivotal year, with the UK government expected to intensely scrutinise how to ensure a smooth transition of television from broadcast to IP delivery over the next decade.
One of the challenges that needs addressing is how to scale the streaming of live events. Those supporting such migrations around the world are exploring hybrid technologies such as DVB-NIP in Europe and ATSC 3.0 in the US, both of which deliver streaming over traditional broadcast distribution to take load off the internet. And others are looking to CDN aggregation to solve the problem.
Here in the UK, BT Group launched a new innovation just over a year ago to support greater efficiency in live streaming. Multicast assisted unicast delivery (MAUD) is now in live field trials, promising a means of providing a scalable end to end IP system for live content. Overall it’s going to be interesting during 2025 to see how all of these technologies evolve into deployments around the world.
Cohorts of engineers
A related theme in 2024 has been one of skills. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the media industry has two distinct cohorts of engineers. Those who grew up with hardware-based engineering and are most comfortable with the stability and reliability of an SDI matrix. Contrast this with those who began their careers later and have grown up with software-based engineering and are most comfortable with ‘spinning up’ workflows on software platforms.
Clearly there is a lot of cross-training going on, and most would be able to deliver solutions in both environments. But the interesting thing to observe is what each would reach for in a high-stakes situation.
A recent industry closed-doors workshop we held ably demonstrated that those engineers who are in senior positions nowadays would reach for physical infrastructure for high value premium sports productions. Their peers who are earlier in their careers, however, have expressed much more comfort in software-based infrastructure. We plan to run another closed-doors workshop with the ‘Leaders of the Future’ to explore this in more detail. Would they align with their senior peers when the topic of Service Level Agreements enters the equation?
The DPP Leaders Briefing has become an annual opportunity to test the temperature of the water in the media industry, and last year’s was no exception. A key theme repeated again and again was one of the challenge of migration. The industry declared a massive transition in 2018 to cloud and software-based workflows.
Now we’re in the middle of this transition and many broadcasters and media organisations are finding it’s really hard. Keeping their existing operations going whilst migrating people, processes and services over to the new. And in a cash crunch.
AI has the potential to play a pivotal role in this transformation but is still in the early stages of usefulness. People are using it for mining archives, and generating prose, pictures, and video, but we’re still waiting for something bigger.
So 2025 is going to be an interesting year of evolution as we push ahead with this transition. Ultimately there’s a lot to play for. Once broadcasters become truly data-driven IT enterprises and the delivery path to the consumer is all-IP, the opportunity to delight the consumer with more content, especially live sport, cost effectively delivered becomes much greater. It’s going to be an exciting and interesting year watching all of this evolve.