As the international federation and governing body for triathlon, World Triathlon is at the helm of a sport that has grown significantly in recent years, both in terms of participation and viewing figures.
The organisation also runs the World Triathlon Championship Series, an annual series of events that takes places in iconic cities across the globe. Given that the championship visits up to ten cities each year, it faces numerous challenges such as varying time differences and adapting to new locations, not to mention the fact that across the swim, bike and run elements there are always multiple stories that need to be told, often at the same time.
For Antonio Arimany, president of World Triathlon, telling these stories and attracting and retaining viewers has been a key focus, something that was central to the decision to work closely with Grup Mediapro.
“I would say there were two key aspects behind the decision to work with Mediapro,” he explains. “One is how can we tell the story better, and how can we better tell the story during the competitions, with the graphics, with the TV production. This is a very key aspect for us, and this is something that working with Mediapro, we have been able to start improving on. The second part is the exposure; the more places you can be seen the better, so we have linear TV, internet TV, and this is where Mediapro could help us also, to give us access to as many markets as possible.”
When it comes to storytelling, graphics have played a key role in keeping viewers informed and engaged, but this is not without its challenges for a sport like triathlon.
“It’s not easy, mainly because of the water component,” he continues. “We have the athletes in the water, and it’s very difficult to send the signal where the athletes are located. What is key is that in any individual event, we need to know through the graphics exactly where the athletes are in order to be able to tell the story. Underwater is the most challenging, but with AI we can have a little bit more of facility on that, because it can recognise athletes by their swim caps, so through different technologies we are able to do it, but we keep investing and investigating all of this. We also need to tell the story of what is happening, not only at the front of the race, but what is happening behind too because things could happen there, and graphics are key for that.”
Currently events are broadcast across linear TV in around 30 countries, including key markets such as France, Germany, Spain, the UK, Brazil, Canada and Japan. In addition, the Triathlon Live OTT platform makes all events available on a pay-per-view basis.
“It’s absolutely working well and every year we increase the number of subscribers, which is very promising. It reflects the interest in triathlon on a large part, but it’s because we cover both things – the linear TV and also the international internet TV broadcasting through our OTT platform.”
Given that the athletes need recovery time between events, the OTT platform has also proved a useful way to engage with fans in between events.
“We are creating a series of documentaries about the athletes and how they prepare for key events. And with the T100 we’re doing an on the path to the Olympic Games series, so we are creating stories and documentaries where the athletes explain their stories, how they prepare, their feelings, their personal stories. We also have second tier events like the World Cup so we can also offer this content, and sometimes we also offer national championships in different continents, or continental championships. We try to cover everything, mainly on the on the OTT platform, and we try to have growth in the showing of triathlon. This is what we have to work on in the next few years, because we are at a starting point and we see that growing is possible for us, absolutely.”
While the OTT platform is growing, investment in the TV production also continues as viewers demand ever-higher quality experiences, something Mediapro is also enabling.
“It has always been one of our priorities to offer good quality broadcasting of events,” highlights Arimany.”We are in an investment phase; we are investing in the TV broadcasting of our sport, and it’s key for us. So normally, we look first to the quality and then, of course, we have to adapt to the budgets. But in our case, together with the local organising committees, we are working with on at each course, things are working well.”
For each event, local organising committees handle the TV production in exchange for the TV rights for the local territory. “Mediapro works alongside these committees to coordinate everything,” he adds. “In some territories they even hire them, in some others we use the national public broadcasters and Mediapro coordinates everything to offer the exactly the same quality all around the world.”
Indeed the scale and scope of what Mediapro can supply has been central to the success of its relationship with World Triathlon.
“Mediapro can offer many services in the sport world, not only the production of the events, but they can also deal with the TV rights. In addition, their international presence makes them very competitive because they are much more present than other companies. They do not have to subcontract other providers in order to do the TV production and that makes them very competitive in the market.”
