Generational shift: Calrec on how sports is swimming against the tide, and still coming out on top
Steve Gligorovic and Marine Martignac in front of a Calrec Apollo
By Sid Stanley, general manager at Calrec.
According to a recent report entitled ‘Game Changing: How sport makes us happier, healthier and better connected’ [Sky Sports 2024], UK adults spent more than 9 billion hours watching and playing sports in 2023.
Of course they did; sport is unique in that it’s unscripted drama that happens in real time, and we wouldn’t be surprised if we find out that the 2024 numbers blow those figures out of the water. It’s truly been a bumper year for live unscripted sports drama, but 2024 has also seen a shift in the way that we’re consuming sports content. A significant shift, according to the most recent IABM State of MediaTech Report, which says that broadcast television has made way for streaming as the dominant means of content consumption. As of July 2024, 41% of viewing in the US was on streaming platforms and just 20% on broadcast platforms.
It’s a generational shift and it’s not shifting back anytime soon. Ofcom says that less than half of viewers (48%) aged 16-24 tune into broadcast TV in an average week, down from 76% in 2018. Viewers between the ages of 45 and 54 are also moving away from broadcast TV, with audiences falling from 89% to 84% in a single year.
It makes investment in sports by non-traditional media businesses inevitable, and so it is proving. Netflix has got in on the act with deals struck with WWE and the NFL, not to mention November’s headline (and nose) busting Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul bout, which left some viewers disappointed when the stream suffered delays and, in some instances, crashed completely, when 60 million households worldwide tuned in. Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox are due to launch their joint sports streaming service in 2025.
Defying trends
Despite all this, live sports are proving resilient; in fact, live sport is the most resilient component of broadcast TV. From SailGP, the French and US Open tennis, Wimbledon, the Euros, Open Golf Championship, Formula E, not to mention the Summer Games in Paris, we’ve been involved in a broad range of events in 2024, and these are defying all the trends. The 2024 Euros final between Spain and England, for example, was watched by 24.2 million viewers on the BBC and ITV [SportsProMedia 2024]. That’s 35% of the entire UK population.
Many of these tournaments ran back-to-back, and broadcasters had to work smarter than ever to ensure they provided ample coverage to both their terrestrial and streaming customers. More than any other year, Calrec partnered with broadcasters to develop hybrid on-site, distributed and on-prem workflows to deliver greater efficiencies, create more content and enable content providers to deliver the highest quality sound to viewers.
Golf is always a challenge due to the geography and distances involved, and the Open Championship in Scotland was once again a technically demanding production, with 151 cameras, 225 microphones and a bank of Calrec RP1s for IFBs. SailGP, now in its fourth season and with events across the globe, built on its remote workflows to mix all the audio in London, while much of the mixing equipment at the Wimbledon tennis competition had a turnaround so tight that some broadcasters drove OBs straight from London to Paris for the Summer Games.
But many more didn’t even need to.
Olympic effort
Calrec hasn’t missed a Summer Games since 1996, and in 2024 more broadcasters than ever were providing mix facilities from afar. The 2022 Beijing Games marked a big shift among many of Calrec’s customers, with broadcasters such as NBC Sports implementing fully remote workflows for all its coverage from the International Broadcast Centre for the first time.
This summer they implemented even more remote, distributed and hybrid networks, enabling them to not only take advantage of remote efficiencies but to deliver more content to streaming and social channels like TikTok. BBC Sport also took a hybrid approach, with onsite mixers as well as mixers at the BBC in Salford in the UK.
France TV used its new hybrid UM1 and UM2 trucks as additional control rooms at their Paris HQ, and Croatian broadcaster Hrvatska Radiotelevizija (HRT) implemented remote production workflows for general event coverage for the first time.
It seems like these new and more efficient ways of working are happening everyday – and they are – but broadcasters still need supporting. From a support perspective it means getting involved in much more complex workflows where consoles no longer operate in isolation. Remote and distributed workflows can locate IP processing cores on site, on edge, or on prem, and promote the adaptability of mix environments to meet the needs of a production rather than the other way around.
More importantly, centralising production enables broadcasters to create more content for more channels. Many of the discussions we’re having with sports broadcasters reflect exactly this and are less about the hardware and more about better utilisation of resources.
Sports broadcasters want to generate content for events that weren’t economically viable before, and more personalised content for events that were. And while viewing habits will continue to change, this is how the industry will also be able to adapt to them.