Connections

M&E Journal: Upping the Monetization Game During Live Sports Broadcasts

By Mike Arthur, SVP, Sports, Live Events Content Licensing, Wazee Digital, a Veritone Company –

For years, sports properties and rights holders— such as golf, football, tennis, swimming and racing associations — have been generating untold amounts of high-value, once-in-a-lifetime, available-nowhere-else content, and their libraries continue to grow with every match or game that’s played. That content is in high demand from all directions — sponsors, advertising agencies, TV and film producers, documentarians, fellow broadcasters and especially, fans. The faster and easier it is to get, the better, because it can mean money in the rights holder’s pocket.

The ability to discover very specific content from an archive quickly — whether it was captured several years ago or two minutes ago — allows rights holders to tell more dynamic stories, either through the event’s broadcaster or through their own digital distribution initiatives (including social, streaming, syndication or complementary channels.)

Lately there has been an explosion in the already frenetic pace of content production thanks to a couple of factors.

First, the cost of production has gone down. Advancements in technology have made it possible to create high-quality output at lower costs than ever before.

Second, there is unrelenting demand. Fans have a seemingly insatiable appetite for content — whether it’s up-to-the minute highlights from the latest game, interviews with their favorite athletes, or behind-the-scenes footage from the practice facility. Because digital distribution outlets, starting with social media, enable direct property-to-fan engagement, sports properties are using these channels to connect with fans. So, in addition to supplying clips to other entities, properties are under pressure to create content for their own purposes.

With such an explosion, coping with all that content and meeting the demand for it has become unwieldy, so sports rights holders need a better way to manage, license and deliver their digital assets. This is especially true in live-broadcast environments, where the pace is fast, and demand is high for clips that are hot off the press.

Beyond Linear

A live-event broadcast tells a linear story from beginning to end. These days, the goal is to extend the story beyond the linear. Digital media channels allow rights holders or sports properties to broaden their reach — and their monetization opportunities — by going deep and wide to enhance the story. For instance, plenty of things happen on a golf course or tennis court outside of the shot. That is, things get captured on camera that are never shown in the broadcast.

Sometimes those moments are more compelling than the actual broadcast. Or, when stitched together, they become part of a larger developing story that could appeal to a broad audience of both hard-core fans and casual viewers.

Whatever the case, rights holders want to make use of all their content and take advantage of every possible opportunity to connect with viewers and monetize assets during and after the broadcast. And to do it, they need an efficient process.

That efficiency comes from the ability to aggregate content in an active archive in the cloud, with rich metadata for accurate search. In combination with a cloud-based portal that enables easy download/distribution, such a solution gives sports properties invaluable management and monetization options with a very light footprint.

The foundation of the solution is Veritone’s Core, an enterprise software-as-a-service asset management platform built specifically for the cloud by Wazee Digital, now a Veritone company.

Core is where sports rights holders can store and manage their vast libraries of digital content securely in the cloud, with storage that scales with the size of the digital archive.

From there, properties can use Veritone’s Digital Media Hub, an application that sits on top of Core, to display and distribute their highly sought-after content. Through Digital Media Hub’s elegant user interface, rights holders and their customers can search, preview and distribute media gleaned from production, post-production, marketing and even live-event environments.

Core and Digital Media Hub are especially useful during live broadcasts because content is captured and ingested directly into Core in near-real time, and once the content enters Core, users can access it immediately through Digital Media Hub and/or make it available through a permission-based hierarchy to global stakeholders.

Furthermore, after an event, sports rights holders can rely on the licensing agent to tag, archive and monetize the organization’s copyrighted events through the Veritone Commerce video licensing platform. Commerce helps rights holders maximize the value of their premium content by connecting with creatives who need video. Buyers such as filmmakers, broadcasters and advertising agencies go to Commerce to discover and purchase clips to use in their projects.

Some sports properties and broadcasters are already taking advantage of this solution. For example, a major national sports association recently used the combination to manage, process and distribute video during its annual tournament, which draws hundreds of thousands of viewers from around the world and generates nearly endless opportunities for licensing and monetization. As a result, the solution played — and continues to play — an important role in the create-distribute-monetize life cycle of the organization’s video.

Create: Core managed the complex tasks of video acquisition, workflow orchestration and metadata management. It provided powerful metadata management to give the rights holder maximum operational efficiency and control. Core’s metadata and discovery functions are driven by Veritone’s aiWARE, the world’s first artificial intelligence (AI) operating system.

Distribute: During the event, the organization had an on-site implementation of Digital Media Hub that automatically processed nearly two dozen concurrent video feeds as they were ingested. Using an ecosystem of leading AI engines, aiWARE automatically generated relevant intelligent metadata within Core, which enhanced subsequent searches within Digital Media Hub, thereby improving operational efficiency, discoverability and usability of valuable media content. Anyone with permissioned access — whether it was one of the property’s own producers or someone looking to purchase a clip — could simply log in from anywhere with an internet connection to find and download what they needed within moments of ingest.

The combination of Core/aiWARE and Digital Media Hub made this event’s media management much smoother and clip utilization must easier than at any past event. The biggest benefits:

Automated metadata enrichment (aiWARE)

— Centralized content access for various stakeholders (Digital Media Hub)

— On-site and post-event content manipulation, such as clipping, tagging, logging embellishment (Core)

— Ability to access Core and Digital Media Hub from a laptop with Wi-Fi (versus heavy production equipment after the event)

— After the event, Commerce connects stakeholders and buyers with the organization’s exclusive content featuring the biggest names in the sport, thereby driving incremental revenue to the property.

In this implementation, faster, more detailed discovery uncovered more and better content for licensing and sponsorship. With an end-to-end, AI-driven digital asset management and monetization solution in a secure cloud environment, sports properties can build purpose-driven workflows that can help improve operational efficiencies, optimize ad and sponsorship verification, repurpose content, enhance competitive research, unlock hidden revenue streams and more. It’s an example of the potential for such a solution to transform the process of monetizing assets from live events.

—-

Click here to translate this article
Click here to download the complete .PDF version of this article
Click here to download the entire Spring/Summer 2018 M&E Journal