SVG Sports OTT Forum: UHD/HDR Super Bowl and WWE highlight day of learning

Third-annual event drew more than 130 attendees to The Paley Center in New York City

More than 130 digital sports media and technology executives gathered for the third-annual SVG USA Sports OTT Forum at The Paley Center for Media in New York City on Tuesday 11 March to take in exclusive case studies and to hash out critical technological and business questions facing the sports video industry.

The event spotlighted conversations and data surrounding consumer behaviours, OTT business strategies, and of course, the critical pieces of the OTT technology stack.

“All of this would never have happened if we didn’t have forums like this to have these conversations,” said Dan Marshall, SVP, worldwide sales and services for AWS Elemental, the event’s title sponsor. “We are infinitely grateful for what SVG has done in putting this forum together and giving us the opportunity to speak, as well as to the user community.

“The relationships that have been built between the vendor and the user community have been very beneficial and we don’t take that lightly. Thanks SVG for that and I know it’s going to be an outstanding day.”

This year’s forum opened with an insightful overview of the state of the industry’s players while taking a dive into the latest data in consumer/subscriber viewership behaviours with William Mao, VP, Media Rights Consulting Division at Octagon.

At the third-annual SVG Sports OTT Forum in New York City on Tuesday, WWE executives Tracey Arrowood-Shaw (left) and Jarrod Smith offered attendees an in-depth look at the relaunch of the D2C service, WWE Network

The programme also featured three illuminating case studies dissecting major projects that took the OTT sports space by storm over the past year. First, WWE’s SVP global strategy and innovation Tracey Arrowood-Shaw and SVP digital products Jared Smith broke down the relaunch of the popular, trailblazing WWE Network.

Fox Sports offered a virtual presentation from its Los Angeles studios to shed light on how it streamed Super Bowl LIV in UHD/HDR. The presentation was given by Fox Corporation’s VP video platforms Steven Thorpe and executive director, live video platform Ben Ziskind.

Lastly, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s distinguished engineer Jason Justman took attendees under the hood of Tennis Channel Plus, the network’s multi-court live streaming service.

The Sports OTT Forum was made possible through the support of the SVG Digital Advisory Committee; Title Sponsor AWS; Diamond Sponsors Limelight Networks, Sony, and Zixi; and Event Sponsors Comcast Technology Solutions, Signiant, The Switch, and Verizon Media.

Stay tuned to www.sportsvideo.org for more coverage from the Sports OTT Forum!