61 HAPPENING SportsPro OTT Summit Review Riot Games’ Alban Dechelotte echoed the importance of community: "If brands want to have success in esports, they have to bring something meaningful to the gaming community." FRESH TALENT The Summit wrapped up with two big keynote sessions. The first was an interview with Unmish Parthasarathi, global head of Digital at Indian streaming giant, Hotstar. Parthasarathi brings a Cambridge education and a Silicon Valley mindset to a pioneering company in a ballooning market. "We don’t think of ourselves at Hotstar as limited to India anymore. We don’t think of ourselves as limited to video." The company is employing a lot of new Asian talent, especially out of China. "On Monday mornings, my most important meeting of the week is reviewing our recruiting funnel. How do we optimise that funnel to become more effective,” asked Parthasarathi. “The most effective way to communicate in China is over Slack. It’s easier than verbal communications. The work ethic and the depth of learning that they’ve brought us in terms of machine learning and AI is incredible." Twitter director of Sport Partnerships, Theo Luke, gave the closing address. Rather than focusing on the future of sports, he looked at the bigger picture of where the power and control of the online content universe was heading. He acknowledged that media companies were universally nervous about the FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), but it’s not a given that these digital monoliths own the future. "I'm personally not convinced the FAANGs have a rational business model for sports rights,” Luke said. He pointed out that Twitter, though not worth as much as these competing tech giants, had a platform with a substantial amount of real world power. "We think the power of Twitter's real time conversation is to help broadcasters and rights holders monetise their assets in real time. Twitter may not be the biggest network, but we are the real time voice of fans.” Luke closed by warning that while all attention was focused on the FAANGs, some media giants were well on their way to global dominance in the media space – specifically Disney, with its acquisition of 21st Century Fox and accelerated expansion into the online space, enhancing what was already an unstoppable juggernaut. "Perhaps the wolf at the door doesn’t look like Jeff Bezos, but Mickey Mouse.”
Having said that, it became very clear that not only is esports growing rapidly – rabidly, even – but that esports itself is changing. What is new this year, may be passé next. "Esports are very tribal communities. If you’re a fan of League of Legends, you might not like fans of DOTA 2. In fact you may try to kill each other,” said Bakker. “Community focus is super important. It's the community that decides what becomes an esport. The relentless focus on community is something other parts of the industry can learn from.” Live events are a key part of the esports experience and Bakker noted there was a burgeoning movement to develop city- based esports, with cities building or redeveloping to create their own esports stadiums. "These live esports events have transformed the notion of sports for millennials,” says Bakker. But traditional broadcast still has a cache and allure that the new digital world seeks. "For esports players, there's something magical about traditional television. It's still a validation, even if their predominant outlet is online. And traditional sports do highlights, replays and other types of coverage really well, which adds a lot to esports coverage." Esports is not without a dark side. Women are a tiny minority of esports athletes, despite the gender split among video game players approaching 50/50. When FEED queried Bakker on the place of women in esports, he was frank about the difficulties that still have to be addressed. "There's a lot of misogyny in esports online. It started in a pretty dark place. Fortnite in the US has a much more balanced audience. The trajectory is heading in the right way." A second esports session included Chris Chaney, founder of Infinite Esports & Entertainment, Chris Mead of Twitch and Alban Dechelotte of Riot Games, and helped further shake delegate preconceptions of the sector. The panel opened with an observation that League of Legends is played by 100 million people – it has more players than viewers.
SPREAD THE WORD Above, Feed editor, Neal Romanek, shares the magazine with other attendees of SportsPro Summit
THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF AN ANTI-PIRACY INVESTIGATION IS THEFINANCIALASPECT. IT’SULTIMATELYAFINANCIALCRIME
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