Ross Video report highlights the importance of innovation to continued sports growth
A new European special report from Ross Video shows that, while sports broadcasting is booming, competition from streaming services and the need to maintain the interest of multiple generations mean that “the stakes for traditional broadcasters have never been higher.”
Entitled ‘A definitive guide to the modern sports viewer’, the report notes the overwhelmingly positive operational context for sports broadcasting, with last year’s global revenue expected to have reached $60 billion. But this impressive growth is not without challenge as traditional broadcasters have to work harder than ever to attract new audiences and retain existing ones in an increasingly fractured marketplace.
The Ross Video report confirms that innovation is one of the most powerful tools that broadcasters have at their disposal. For younger generations in particular, sports content needs to be suitable for increased consumption via smartphone or tablet, while there is also a strong desire for innovation when it comes to graphics and visuals. Driven by the gamification of sports broadcasting, this trend calls for a greater choice of camera angles, enhanced analysis and additional special features.
With 31% of viewers messaging friends and family about the sport they are watching, there is also a growing requirement for broadcasters to provide short highlight packages that contain key facts or stats – after all, as the report notes, “modern fans are already doing this, so any way broadcasters can encourage this level of interactivity gives fans what they want, and will get more eyes on your content”.
Despite the increased availability of lower and middle tier sports in recent years, the report underlines the remarkable dominance of football. Since 2022, football has been the premier sport by a significant margin, and in Germany and the UK there is a 30% difference between football’s popularity and the next nearest sport. Tennis and F1 round out the top three, although some sports that recorded a lower in-market following – such as boxing and basketball – are also among those likely to seek greater levels of engagement. Meanwhile, the tendency for most of these sports to crescendo in the final minutes calls for graphics and other features that really “ramp up excitement”.
Other notable insights in the report include a trend towards simultaneous viewing – 18% of fans across Europe now watch multiple sports at the same time – and an expectation that broadcasters address environmental impact, which is particularly apparent among viewers in Ireland and the UK.
Personalisation potential
James Ransome, Ross Video
James Ransome, senior business development manager at Ross Video, says that “the overall context is a positive one, and one point to stress is that we’re not saying in any way, shape or form that linear is dying. There’s still a huge amount of linear viewing and I think there will always be those big ‘gather the family around the TV’ moments.”
Nonetheless, it is clear that audiences are increasingly viewing other content in tandem with their ‘primary’ sports viewing. “One of the things we were most interested in with these findings is how much people are actually on social when watching sports now,” says Ransome. “I think there can be a lot of assumed beliefs in the industry, so it’s always good to actually validate some of those beliefs.”
Looking ahead, he expects personalisation to be an increasingly powerful driver of innovation. “I’m very much an overlaid statistics kind of guy, so I will tend to dial that up in my preferences, but there are also plenty of people who want to focus on the game that is being played out in front of them in a more ‘traditional’ way,” says Ransome. “I think it will come down to personalisation, and broadcasters should certainly be looking at methodologies of expanding out that personalisation potential if they’re not already doing so.”
Rules of engagement
Alan Rufaie, head of insight at beIN Media Group, says that the report findings resonate with the company’s own current experience. “We definitely see that younger viewers are engaging with sports as much as the older viewers; it’s just that they’re engaging in different ways, which includes wanting more control,” he says. “So that tends to mean they want to watch what they want to watch, and how and when they want to watch it. And as this report indicates, they’re very used to second-screening and looking at their mobile phones, so it doesn’t surprise me that they have this increased expectation of more statistics.”
Alan Rufaie, beIN Media Group
In terms of future innovation, Rufaie expects AI to help bring advanced analysis and overlay within the reach of most sports, although the commercial viability of mixed reality elements such as VR and AR is yet to be established. “Some things are genuine requirements, and some things are nice to have,” he notes. “People may claim they want them in surveys but then not necessarily use them that often. I think you see the same sort of pattern with player-cams, where people might try them out but still incline towards the traditional viewpoint of the match.”
But there is no doubting that, increasingly, engagement goes hand-in-hand with social media usage. “Viewers are engaging more with sport online, and with highlights and mini-matches,” says Rufaie. “One of the things we do is to give viewers lots of different options, from 30-minute packages down to five- or two-minute highlights.”
Investment for interactivity
Gareth Gordon, CTO of Glasgow-based outside broadcast and remote production company QTV, says that the findings of the report are “very much in keeping with our experiences. We cover a lot of football, and the gamification of the graphics and the interaction that people now expect chimes very true” – not least among QTV’s own younger team members, who are “all involved heavily in the sport they are covering, but are also discussing and looking at various clips on X, Facebook and TikTok.”
Gareth Gordon, QTV
But while he welcomes continued innovation and knows that “the direction of travel is clear to see”, Gordon does fear there will be repercussions for the coverage of sports with smaller audiences. “As a company which services lower-tier sports, we are very aware that the interaction craved by fans does not come cheaply,” he says. “With the transition to streaming, some of these sports had finally got their moment in the sun, but now with increased gamification and multi-platform engagement there is a risk of the disenfranchisement of some sports.” He urges the industry to consider “how we tackle this because it requires investment and experience. In Scotland at the moment there is a shortage of people who have opportunities to build their working knowledge of new and emerging technologies and experience of delivering high-level productions.”