Content Insider #993 – Playyyy
| By Andy Marken – andy@markencom.com Source – NAB One of the neat things about trade shows is you get to forget about politics and pretty much everything that is happening in the “real world,” and focus on new products, new technologies, renewed acquaintances and determine for yourself what’s hot/what’s not. We’ll be covering NAB with two reports because… This year’s event was really overshadowed by sports – who’s going to pay for it, who’s going to do what to whom, who was going to be cut out, who’s going to pay for it, and on the show floor side, how good can it be. Sure, the show floor sessions were thick with AI, and it hit us even before we got to the convention center. AI made us think differently about everything like when we stopped in a coffee shop – Dunkin – in the Las Vegas shopping mall. Source – Andy Marken We know their promo tie line is “The World Runs on Dunkin” but…they’ve been replaced. Nope! The world runs on Nvidia or at least Jensen Huang wants you to think that and it all runs on the company’s increasingly powerful (and expensive) GPUs. But, leading up to the show it was more than obvious that sports were on the table, and everyone was drawing a line, taking a stand or trying to figure out … WTF. Sports – futball (globally), football (US), baseball, basketball, rugby, hockey, rugby, cricket, cycling, boxing, wrestling, table tennis, gymnastics, swimming, golf, tennis, you name it – is a multi–billion–dollar global industry. It garners massive streaming/TV contracts because events attract major audiences (ratings) and big ad dollars that every streamer, network and local station wants a piece of. And a sports event (any sport) can be sliced and diced a thousand different ways to make money for the league, owners, distribution folks and ultimately, the participants and the betting community. Source – GiveMeSport In a few months, assuming government idiots stay out of the way, millions of people will fly to cities in Mexico, Canada and the US to cheer their team to victory. It will be a period when athletes put their differences aside and focus on the game…maybe/hopefully much smaller minds can do the same. In addition, millions more people will be skipping work/class, depriving themselves of sleep and cheering/ crying as they watch the action on big screens and smartphones. It used to be simple networks signed up for exclusive rights to show the play by play in their country. Source – EMarketer Viewing Patchwork – Knowing exactly where to find your favorite sport, team and game has become increasingly difficult because associations, leagues and teams have more distribution options. But then streamers got into the act and were willing to pay bigger bucks (really bigger) for various exclusive rights and TV networks, local stations were removed from the equation. Suddenly, we were talking about a real business deal. Source – Business Research Company Events like the annual US football super bowl attracted 127.7M sets of eyeballs and advertisers were willing to pay a helluva lot for a 30–sec spot. This year, Disney is already “offering” their 30s on ESPN for an eye–watering $10M compared to a lowly $7M last year (yeah, they’re getting pushback) but… And the league – all sports leagues – want more for their events and it’s getting difficult for linear networks/local stations to write the checks. Linear TV still delivers key moments but increasingly, it’s the digital environment that league and team owners lean on because the money’s good and they’re able to more easily tap into a global audience. And global greed raises the bar for everyone. Source – MediaPost While streamers are members of NAB, the association was very vocal prior to the convention in telling (asking) the FCC to limit sports franchises from signing exclusive distribution agreements with the leading bidders (streamers) that give the big four in the US (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox) and local stations equal coverage opportunities for their audiences. Citing the poor consumers’ plight, the NAB noted that last year’s games were only available on 10 different paywalled platforms. To follow the teams, subscriptions would have been about $1,500 because they – Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple and other techies have nearly limitless budgets that consistently cut the Big 4 and local stations out of the picture. Source – Cave Anne Mobile View – Streaming has enabled people to constantly follow the action from everywhere and view it in real time. Association folks forgot to add that online sports have enabled folks to watch their favorite team/game/event anywhere, using any device and that’s why streaming sports is even more desirable to enthusiasts. NAB asked the government to ensure networks and local broadcasters guarantee distribution availability and “preserve” sports on broadcast TV so they could use the event profits to fund local news (yeah, it’s complicated). Source – LinkedIn Control – Rights holders and streamers will share the responsibility of giving fans the games, events, activities they want this year and in the years ahead. Perhaps what they’re saying is they want to limit what the global sports organizations and franchises can do. In all of these “discussions,” there is little mention of the fact that the consumer prefers on–demand and live content, which is stimulating more interest, more sports value. It also turns out that streaming has enabled/encouraged the services to develop more viewing opportunities for the sports fans with more sports content which keeps them subscribing longer. Source – LinkedIn Beneficiary – With the increased use of AI in live sports coverage, streamers and major sports will be the immediate beneficiaries; but ultimately, it will be the fan/fanatic who determines its success. The leagues, sports franchises and bidding delivery services market specialists point out that the streamers win more marketing and promotional opportunities than were dreamt of by the linear TV folks. They note that streamers are developing more events and activities around the sports such as highlight reels, podcasts and online activities that loyal stalwarts, superfans, and casual spectators really want. Source – Verimatrix Instead of pitting a few association members against sports in general, various bidding services and advertisers, they should spend their time, energy and creativity in solving the industry’s real problem – piracy. StreamEast registered over 1.6B visitors last year who “enjoyed” the free viewing of soccer, NFL, NBA, MLB and other events, but it is far from alone. Sports piracy costs an estimated $28B a year in lost revenues or roughly half the value of the sports media industry. Why not “lean” on Huang’s AI–driven solutions” and solve the problem for “all” parties? There were plenty of examples on the show floor that showed the industry had moved beyond the association noise to breathe new life and excitement into sports. Even though the best we can be called is a casual (very casual) fan, it’s really amazing what folks have been able to do to make a game/event more immediate, more interesting, more immersive. Source – ESPN Source – LinkedIn Live Action, Production – Game play gets up close, personal and real with instant capture, production and distribution with today’s advanced systems and tools. Whether it’s futball or football, the industry is capturing an unbelievable number of live feeds (cameras everywhere), sending them to mobile and central production operations where creative and technical teams and directors are making instant decisions (with the assistance of AI) on what gets sent over the air and what is archived for possible later use. Source – LinkedIn The overriding issue at this year’s NAB wasn’t the industry’s shift to IP but whether capture, processing, and distribution could be reliably delivered by today’s software–defined, AI–integrated workflows. Media over Quic (MoQ) has become an industry standard thanks to IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) to consistently deliver sub–1s latency along with WebRTC (real time communication) speeds and today’s HTTP scalability. Key industry participants like Appear, Evertz, Matrox and Reidel highlighted their approaches to hybrid workflows, low–latency transmission and software–defined, AI–integrated solutions. Source – Blackmagic Design Even our friends at Blackmagic surprised us not––only with a whole new set of high–performance, economic cameras to capture every moment of the sport action, but they’re also address the production needs with a new family of live production Ultra HD switchers, recorders, monitoring racks, and cripes, even storage racks to reliably save all that event audio/video content for “other” distribution opportunities. Looking back, we wonder if Dan May, CEO, had any idea of what Grant Perry, Blackmagic Design founder, had in mind when he joined the smallish Melbourne, AU–based camera company and Perry told him he wanted the company to be video capture leader. The company continually surprises and impresses us when we see what they deliver for the ever–changing entertainment industry. But we got a good look at how much more detailed and complex real time coverage – especially of sporting events – has become at TVU’s booth where they highlighted the latest advances in their cloud–based MediaMesh workflow––especially with the addition of Pixop’s real time processing and enhancement capabilities. Source – Unsplash Sports delivers something that is difficult to find in any other segment of the entertainment industry – large audiences that come together all at the same time and for them, every moment is important and occasionally vital and sacred. That makes the activity (all of it) important to the folks covering/delivering the activity to do it virtually instantly, so the fan(s) feel they’re not only there but seeing/feeling it completely. To achieve this, TVU’s MediaMesh solution has to handle signal feeds from multiple sources – cameras, formats, quality levels – encode, process them in multiple formats to meet the needs of the various viewing types…instantly and flawlessly. Pixop fits seamlessly in the pre–encoding of the operation to mix live inputs, handle deinterlacing, upscaling, dynamic range alignment and quality restoration in a single pass with virtually no latency and without any changes/investment in the existing infrastructure or operation. All of the stuff we saw on the floor at NAB pays off because the global sports–centric audience is huge and diverse. Source – Sports Marketing Analytics Growing – With streaming anytime, anyplace, any screen, sport audiences will grow around the globe; and with every content delivery enhancement, so will their expectations and desire to experience it…all. Soccer boasts over 3.5B fans worldwide and this year’s World Cup will probably pump that up to 5B viewers, impacting the productivity of companies everywhere (an estimated $5B in lost productivity). It’s also expected (hoped) that the contests expansion to 48–teams playing across three countries will create unparalleled global buzz, viewership and engagement. These people don’t want any hiccup in the event/contest they’re watching. They expect (demand?) real–time, personalized and interactive streaming to any/all screens they are close to. AI, the advanced, versatile and comprehensive capture/production solutions have raised the expectations of people everywhere for…everything. It has expanded beyond a specific contest. Source – Freepik DTC sports are growing to include automated, instant highlight clips; real–time, multi–language voiceover/captions; personalized highlight reels; creator–led storytelling and hyper–personalized content for advertisers and fans. Oh yeah, lest we forget…real–time betting analytics and tracking. The day of one–size–fits–all sports coverage/viewing has passed. AI may have helped but it took the creative minds and talents of the people/companies on the NAB floor and sports broadcast specialists to bring fans closer to the action or the action closer to the fan. Now the industry needs to turn their attention to securing and protecting the content. Then they can work on making the ads less intrusive, less obnoxious, less less. Andy Marken – andy@markencom.com – is an author of more than 900 articles on management, marketing, communications, industry trends in media & entertainment, consumer electronics, software and applications. Internationally recognized marketing/communications consultant with a broad range of technical and industry expertise especially in storage, storage management and film/video production fields. Extended range of relationships with business, industry trade press, online media and industry analysts/consultants. |
(27th April 2026, London, U.K.) Cyclops is a head-mounted POV camera system designed to capture…
Starting in April, Vocana (vocana.co) will distinguish human artists playing live with a Verified Human Artist badge, the…
Millions who failed to file or pay now face penalties that grow every day -…
NYC's 18-year-old music school combines international jazz immersions with summer intensives and year-round community NEW…
TORONTO, ON / ACCESS Newswire / April 29, 2026 / New Horizon Aircraft Ltd. ("Horizon…
Now Available to Thousands of Businesses Worldwide, Marketing Suite Delivers Pre-Built, AI-Personalized Automations Powered by…