59 HAPPENING SportsPro OTT Summit
REACHING THE SUMMIT The SportsPro OTT Summit included wide- ranging discussions about the application of new digital advances
To improve the fan experience, Doyne and his team trialled technologies that look at not only the different kinds of viewers and the platforms they are viewing on, but exactly how they are viewing, too. They have worked with eye-tracking technology, for example, to study where people look during a NBA game, and as result have experimented with placing the shot clock in unorthodox places on the screen – on the basketball court itself, for example, to enable a more seamless viewing experience. He said: “The key to every experience is personalisation. If you’re a fan, you want to follow every game of your favourite team.” Improving the experience means delivering the option of a mosaic to superfans to enable easy engagement with multiple games at once. PLAN FOR TWO MILLION In case delegates didn’t know it before, it became clear through the summit that a seamless, technology-amplified viewer experience was hard won. Evan Vernon, director of product management at Comcast Technology, pointed out that you couldn’t just throw money and computing power at a problem and expect it to go away. Delivering the best possible quality of service to viewers in the OTT space – especially in high-traffic content like sports – requires skill, expertise and creativity. Sports is one of the last bastions
IF YOU THINK A MILLION PEOPLE ARE GOING TO WATCH SOMETHING, PLAN FOR TWOMILLION
of live, shared space in entertainment, he noted. “Sports are great unifiers. Live streaming and sports are inherently social constructions. Game of Thrones is something you can watch alone now. But sports are inherently social. Live streaming is inherently social, and you can distribute it anywhere in the world. And it’s the greatest challenge for distribution in history from a technology perspective.”
Vernon pointed to the problems with the recent Disney+ launch. The difficulties new subscribers had in accessing the service weren’t due to lack of technological provision. It was a matter of quality, not quantity. “The applications weren’t architected correctly. When they built it, they didn’t build it for enough scale.” He warned: “The things that you think are going to bring you down aren’t the things that are going to bring you down.” His intention wasn’t to trash Disney, but to point out how challenging delivering OTT content at a massive scale really is. He explained: “Building technology for one user is expensive and complicated. Building it for 10,000 users is exponentially more complicated. Building it for 100,000 users is probably the most challenging task in the OTT space today. Going up one user can be the difference between the whole thing working perfectly and the whole thing going the f*** down.” In the live streaming world, planning is everything, said Vernon. “How many people are going to watch this thing? Forecasting is life. If you think a million people are going to watch something, plan for two million.” SportsPro has two more OTT events coming up, one in in Atlanta (19 to 20 February) and the other in Singapore (25 to 26 March).
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