At The World Games 2025 held in China this August, the International World Games Association (IWGA) officially launched The World Games Live, a dedicated global streaming platform created to bring event to fans worldwide.
The World Games Live was developed in partnership with host broadcaster for The World Games, International Sports Broadcasting (ISB). The platform offered extensive live coverage of competitions, the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, and medal ceremonies for all 34 sports on the programme. After each event concluded, all streamed content was made available as video on demand (VoD), ensuring fans could relive the highlights whenever they choose.
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Additionally, the platform featured daily highlights and a dedicated Daily Show throughout the Games, thanks to ISB. The application was available on desktop and mobile versions, completely free-of-charge.
Defeating a snafu
While the overall production for The World Games went smoothly for ISB, just a few months out from the Games, the OTT streaming platform that ISB was developing for the federation hit a snafu. ISB had to find a completely new developer for the platform and start from scratch again, but this time, with a hard deadline to go live in just three months.
ISB finished the platform on 27 July, launched it on the 28 July, and the Games started on 7 August.
Romero says that in the end, the platform, “launched and it went amazing”. She goes on: “It was really successful despite the fact we had to basically rebuild the whole platform. Three months before the games, I had to make the decision to come up with a new provider, a platform provider, backend and front end. We had to start from scratch. We had to find a new video player, a new platform provider, a new CMS; new everything.
“And so we were all very worried, including the IWGA, because three months was very, very little time to build a platform from scratch,” continues Romero. “But except for one day [during the Games] where the distribution gods went against us and a main server in Sweden went down and some fibre connectivity between Miami and Germany went down, it all just kind of aligned. The rest of the time, the platform worked amazingly. We didn’t have any glitches.”
Viral spread
The platform had a total of 1.4 million unique users on Apple iOS. On the iOS world ranking, the app was number 22 on downloads. The top viewership countries were Germany, the US, Canada, and Mexico.
Adds Romero: “I’m not an expert, but from the fact that we only started promoting the platform literally two weeks before the game started, [getting to number 22 on the iOS download rankings] was huge. We had almost 140,000 downloads of the app. Flag football was the top sport, followed by flying disc and lacrosse.
“The platform did really, really well, so everybody was very happy considering that we had zero promotional budget for the platform as well; it was purely organic and we wanted to do it organically just to see how it would work.”
Continues Romero: “We were super happy with it and I think the IWGA should be happy with it; all the federations loved it. It was all live. We added in athlete profiles; we got up to almost 4,000 athlete profiles with their Instagram accounts on there so the athletes could then automatically share our vertical content that we created around the app to promote the app only during Games time. Some of the videos went viral. They were just short, vertical content. So it was really, really great. I was amazed how it just went!”
What’s next
Moving forwards, ISB hopes that the OTT platform will be used to enable viewers to relive moments from previous Games, be a place for archive material to be aired, and to sustain the enthusiasm for these non-Olympic events inbetween Games.
Romero says: “Now we’re obviously thinking, what do we do with the app? Do we take it down? Do we make it live on, and we’re having a meeting with the IWGA to discuss strategy moving forward and how we’re going to continue to make it live until the next World Games.”
She adds: “Now we want to make it evolve and we want to make it the only place to watch The World Games. I think that’s the only way to go forward. I think if we manage to convince the IWGA that this needs to be the only place for The World Games and for all the streams, broadcasts, athletes, federations related to The World Games, I think it can be really something cool that can live on, and we can start adding onto it and making it into something.”
The World Games took place from 7 to 17 August 2025. The World Games is a worldclass multi-sport event, organised every four years since 1981, for sports and disciplines that are not (yet) in the Olympic Games.
