Making globalisation pay: LTN considers live sports broadcasting at scale in 2024
By Mike Burk, LTN general manager, event production and transmission unit.
The live sports broadcasting landscape is undergoing a huge period of transformation and fragmentation. Major streaming services and tech giants like Apple, Amazon, and YouTube, which have traditionally focused their efforts on on-demand video content, are making substantial investments in live sports rights, bringing new competition to the established live sports broadcasting market.
This evolution marks a profound shift from the age-old model of traditional sports broadcasting, as viewers continue to gravitate toward live streaming as the go-to viewing method for premier sports content.
This shift presents new challenges for broadcasters, sports streamers, and rights holders, now tasked with delivering high value live events across multiple digital platforms at a global scale. It’s worth remembering that these types of live events weren’t originally designed to be distributed at scale, and many rights holders don’t have the infrastructure to manage the complexities of facilitating global cross-platform distribution.
Rights holders understand the value of live sports content – it’s one of our industry’s best-selling exports. The globalisation of sports as a whole – and surging digital viewership – mean content versioning and multi-platform distribution has never been more important.
In a world where getting close to your consumers is everything, content providers are quickly realising they need specialist tools to ensure live events reach audiences worldwide with a tailored, personalised feel to resonate with diverse audiences. In 2024, content versioning innovation will empower sports leagues, federations, and rights holders to capitalise on growing global demand.
Engaging with global audiences
Amid ongoing viewer shifts toward streaming platforms, content providers need to reach global audiences at an unprecedented scale via digital distribution channels. Streaming subscribers expect seamless access to high quality live content; it’s one of the main pull factors for any streaming service. And as viewer expectations evolve, content providers are continually challenged to deliver live programming that captivates and retains a diverse and demanding subscriber base.
Rights holders need to take a nuanced approach to content versioning to provide digital audiences with tailored, culturally-relevant live sports experiences. This process involves the versioning of live event feeds to create language-tailored, platform-specific versions of live events, enabling regionalisation at a massive scale and driving downstream monetisation through targeted advertising.
Cloud-enabled versioning tools that can tailor live event content with local language commentary, custom graphics, and targeted advertising are helping major sports streamers pursue an effective global distribution strategy every day. In 2024, content versioning technology will continue to simplify the customization of sports content at scale, making live events more universally accessible and valuable than ever before.
While flexible content decoration tools can help deliver the language-specific video elements required for international fans to engage more deeply with niche live sports from different parts of the world, the data that lies beneath video feeds is also critical to enabling regionalisation at scale.
By enriching video streams with advanced metadata signalling and SCTE triggers, content owners can enable maximum downstream monetisation while seamlessly meeting diverse format requirements across global markets. Ensuring that sports content is translated effectively to cater to different geographies and over the top (OTT) platform requirements is crucial in both enhancing viewer engagement and underpinning a successful international distribution strategy.
IP foundations for flexible distribution
The shift to streaming necessitates robust, scalable, and flexible video transport solutions that can deliver global reach while maximizing monetisation opportunities. Many media brands have already explored IP-based transport as a future-ready alternative to legacy distribution technologies, but are facing several limitations with less sophisticated, protocol-only IP solutions.
With intelligent routing protocols and proprietary infrastructure, a fully managed, multicast-enabled IP network can help overcome the challenges of internet delivery while delivering ultra-low latency and high reliability.
In today’s hybrid broadcasting world, many of the newer, digital-native market entrants do not possess the infrastructure typically associated with full time channel delivery. And in a fast-paced sports market, it may not make sense to invest significant amounts of time and money to develop the technology in-house to handle complex live video distribution workflows.
More and more, rights holders are embracing IP-based transmission foundations with the flexibility to spin up live event master control systems on an event-specific basis, helping drive operational efficiency, manage costs, and simplify global distribution across digital platforms and FAST services.
Consumer-first content production
As consumer preferences continue to evolve in 2024, so will the approach to live sports production. Sports broadcasters are re-evaluating their production techniques to align with increased consumption across digital platforms and mobile devices. The challenge lies in enabling greater flexibility in production, helping rights owners create multiple versions of content that resonate with audiences across a diverse range of devices. This may include implementing alternate camera angles, custom graphics, and caption placements tailored to preferred audience devices.
As viewership patterns continue to shift from linear TV to mobile and other digital platforms, media companies must stay agile and keep creativity at the core. The aim is to produce content that is engaging and accessible, whether viewed on a large TV screen or a compact mobile device. This approach requires the marrying of technical excellence, creative vision, and advanced production tools to ensure that content remains compelling and relevant in an increasingly global, digital media landscape.
Sports streaming success in 2024
In the rapidly evolving live sports broadcasting space, the critical role of a strategic technology partner cannot be overstated. The transition from traditional linear consumption to diverse digital platforms means many media companies are moving beyond legacy workflows and methodologies to unlock greater operational efficiencies and tackle the challenge – and opportunity – that global scale presents. Media companies are realizing the benefits of harnessing proven partnerships and an OPEX-favoured approach to help navigate digital distribution cost effectively and at scale.
In a live sports broadcasting environment where there are no second chances, having a reliable partner that can reduce operational complexities, streamline operations, and give you a good night’s sleep is invaluable, empowering sports broadcasters to focus more on content creation and less on the technical intricacies of multi-platform, global distribution.