Broadcast via the public internet is old tech. If you want to include internet radio, it was up and running by the early 1990s. Live and on-demand coverage of the Olympic Games was available online in 2004, and today OTT sports platforms are a booming segment of the ecosystem. What’s new about OTT is not technology, but strategy. And opportunity.

OTT today is about much more than broadcasting over the internet. It’s about a building a full spectrum hub for long-term engagement with your audience.

“You create a direct connection to the end customer,” says Tobias Fröhlich, managing director, product at Qvest. “There’s one IP stream and one IP address and you learn from your customers directly. Whereas as a broadcaster, I just send something out and pray that everybody likes it.”

Fröhlich says that it’s important to set aside broadcast thinking when you’re working with OTT. What you’re really creating is an app that will be an interface with your fan. The types of interaction that can happen via that app are as limited as your imagination. Qvest created an interactive feed product for the German Football League (DFL) via its white label product TVXRAY.

“We look at the sport and try to bring everything that’s relevant to the surface and make it clickable. Everything that is of interest to the fans should be clickable and within their reach.”

App-based engagement fuels greater customisation for fans too. Whatever a fan’s personal connection to a team, player, region or any other data point, optimised experiences can help them find the game moments they most care about. Though a player or team might not be a national favourite, it’s a simple matter to make sure a superfan of that particular player or team gets notifications about content that includes them.

A new OTT mindset

Broadcasters often bemoan the dropping numbers in TV consumption. But viewers spend more time on screens today than anyone could have imagined they would be capable of. During that time, they are still consuming broadcast content. Except, instead of committing to sitting before a single screen for three hours, they consume the broadcast via clips, social video and highlights, that are grazed on throughout the day.

The end result can actually be more time spent with the event or team. Rather than being limited to a handful of committed sessions, audiences can absorb more significant moments, coverage and supplemental materials from a variety of games or teams. Commitment may not be as deep, but total engagement is broader, and the audience insights gained from this ongoing relationship are invaluable.

“What we’re seeing with our sports customers is a desire for more control over their content in order to drive fan engagement,” explains Barry Owen, chief solutions architect at Wowza. “OTT platforms enable sports organisations to own their monetisation strategies, combining subscriptions, advertising and commerce in ways that are agile and tailored to that audience.”

Using audience viewing data, the Wowza video platform can help companies automatically create and publish unique highlight reels based on what’s trending or what a viewer’s favourite athletes are doing. Polls, chats and stats can complement the action, along with personalised viewing options, like choosing camera angles, multiview experiences, or exclusive shoulder content.

“Everything that is of interest to the fans should be clickable and within their reach”

Tools like Magnifi can be added to the mix. This uses proprietary AI to generate additional material, automating the creation of clips, highlights and metadata at scale. Magnifi’s customers include FIFA, Wimbledon, TV2 in Norway and the Portugal Football Federation.

“Broadcasters, federations and leagues are looking to find new ways to answer three different questions,” says Ross Tanner, Magnifi’s SVP for EMEA. “How can we do more with our existing content and maximise it across platforms? How can we make things more efficient and perhaps more cost effective? And how can we monetise?

“Gone are the days where you would produce highlights yourselves and try to locate new stories across the game. In the new world – though it has actually existed for a while now – using automation services lets clips and highlights hit platforms in real time.”

Partnerships with platforms

ViewLift’s end-to-end streaming platform has been used to power the OTT destinations of a wide variety of leagues and teams, starting with Monumental Sports Network, and now encompassing 16 teams and six regional sports networks (RSNs).

“We live in this world 24/7,” says Rick Allen, CEO of ViewLift. “For every one of our clients, you still have to deliver a terrific live telecast. Your subscribers or visitors want to watch the game. It’s got to be crisp and low latency. From that central core, then there are a whole host of other things that can and should be done. You want to be the hub for all the fan relationships with the team.”

Allen explains that the expanded offering and audience relationship that OTT platforms provide can put a league or team in a position of strength when it comes to business. He cites the early days of ViewLift’s first sports partner Monumental Sports Network, initially a platform to increase sports streaming opportunities into the Washington, DC region.

“Having a streaming platform, Monumental’s negotiations with its RSN partner, NBC Sports Washington, were done from a position of strength because they saw they could move the games for teams like the Washington Capitals and Wizards off linear TV to streaming exclusively and have access to the totality of the company’s rights regions.”

The deal Monumental negotiated with NBC Sports Washington included an ownership stake, and then later on buying out NBC. Now with Monumental controlling both its linear representation and its ViewLift-powered streaming platform, it is the exclusive streamer for all local games within the RSN territories permitted by the league.

Rethinking the stream

“Live sports are some of the highest value content and it needs to be low-latency, global and secure,” says Michelle Munson, CEO at Eluvio, whose Content Fabric technology enables the distribution of video across a network of nodes instead of through centralised public cloud or CDNs.

OTT platforms promise fans greater engagement and more offerings, but that of course introduces more complexity – and work – at each stage. Eluvio’s Content Fabric is a rethink of the streaming infrastructure which, through eliminating the need for multiple files and multiple storage points, simplifies both content access and distribution and gives customers more control.

European Professional Club Rugby (EPCR) is one of Eluvio’s newest, direct-to-consumer customers, and is being joined on the platform this month by its sister organisation United Rugby Championship (URC). Use of Eluvio allowed EPCR to get to multiple new markets globally, with around 70 new countries reached and substantial profitability. EPCR was able to build a fan base in countries it hadn’t anticipated including Italy, New Zealand, Australia and Japan. Across the two leagues, Eluvio will host over 400 live rugby matches in the next year, plus the ticketing and season passes through the same platform.

Video over IP distribution has been a technology cobbled together over years from many different parts, which has resulted in loss of control and lots of friction and this has made it difficult to get the best possible data on that most important partner, the audience.

“It’s been very difficult to create the end-to-end context. Even if parties want to share data between each other, it’s still practically difficult to do it,” says Munson.

Eluvio aims to eliminate these multiple workflow journeys and bring in greater security and direct connection between content and audience without sending content through multiple partners. The goal is simplicity for tech teams and for customers.

“Looking ahead,” says Owen, “OTT will continue to redefine sports media, shifting control to rights holders, driving deeper engagement, and enabling more resilient and scalable business models.”