Setting a gold standard for live sports broadcasting

When it comes to audience engagement and reach, nothing compares to live sports. This summer promised an extensive lineup of exciting live sporting events that will captivate an audience of 22 million European sports fan households. These loyal consumers are invaluable to both brands and broadcasters.

With abundant premium content and a myriad of ways to consume it, sports broadcasters must carve out a competitive edge by ensuring their resources are effectively allocated to achieve optimal cost efficiencies while being able to deliver more content and craft more compelling stories. In the pursuit of providing the perfect viewing experience, the sports broadcast space has seen experimentation and innovation like never before.

The latest summer of sports presents significant challenges and opportunities as the demand for high-quality viewing experiences rises. Euro 2024 was expected to attract a cumulative live audience of 5 billion viewers worldwide. Additionally,  51% of US Olympic viewers were projected to stream the Paris Olympics, up from 28% in 2021. This surge in viewership underscores the industry’s need for quality technology innovation. However, balancing these evolving expectations within complex media ecosystems requires a thoughtful and strategic approach.

Reaching audiences everywhere from anywhere

Remote production capabilities are crucial. Efficient remote production and post-production workflows ensure that high-value content can be delivered seamlessly from disparate locations, maintaining the quality and consistency that audiences expect.

Cloud production technology plays a key role in achieving this efficiency and enabling significant increases in production scale. By transferring the burden of building and maintaining the ecosystem to the cloud provider, broadcasters can better manage costs by reducing their reliance on physical infrastructure. Leveraging cloud technology allows media players to navigate the complexities of modern live production with greater flexibility and cost efficiency. These benefits position them to dynamically scale operations and reduce overhead. In a landscape where time is paramount, organisations can focus on delivering more content, enhancing media management, streamlining post-production workflow automation, and facilitating content inspection and correction. Broadcasters can collaborate more effectively and maintain high production standards, regardless of location, capturing more with less.

With audience retention at the forefront, broadcasters can identify more effective ways of engaging their audiences. The right workflow in place can enable visual cues like live in-game statistics and closed captions to provide real-time information, making the viewing experience more engaging. Media companies can also provide multiple languages in their broadcasts, which will complement the greater reach as they will better resonate with audiences from different regions, engrossing them in the game or competition they are watching. The right workflow should also boast the right test and measurement capabilities to ensure superior, high-quality content delivery in UHD, HDR, or 4K. The transition will not only empower media companies to adapt to the standards, but with the right tools at the helm, they’ll also be able to differentiate themselves from competitors by providing a superior viewing experience. By combining these advanced technology features, broadcasters can meet the high expectations of a diverse global audience and enhance their monetisation potential.

Streamlining workflows to maximise efficiencies

To support these interactive and engaging experiences, broadcasters must also focus on streamlining their workflows. Centralised content management solutions, whether deployed in the cloud, on-premises, or as hybrid systems, can significantly enhance media management, on-location file retrievals, and live editing. Automating time-intensive post-production workflows helps build efficient remote production capabilities.

A streamlined and carefully designed workflow enables broadcasters to support the high volume of demand by scaling up operations and adapting at short notice. This flexibility is crucial for driving cost efficiencies and deploying resources as effectively as possible. 

The Oklahoma City Thunder, a leading NBA team, demonstrates one notable benefit of a streamlined workflow for managing and broadcasting live sporting events. Previously, OKC Thunder had to sort through thousands of content clips in various formats and resolutions and this time-consuming manual task limited productivity across their 500,000 sq ft campus.

To address this issue, Oklahoma City Thunder deployed a workflow management system that improved efficiency, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. It particularly looked for a flexible workflow management solution to support its need to churn content at a faster rate, whether for a live broadcast, a two-hour feature, or a 20-second social clip. Implementing a tool that directly responded to these needs allowed the team to retrieve data, archive existing files, uniform data formats, and control footage quality (including latency issues) from any location. This system benefits the broadcast team and ensures high-quality content is seamlessly distributed to fans.

Setting the standard with 2110

Building on the importance of efficient workflows demonstrated by the Oklahoma City Thunder, leading sports broadcasters must also invest in acquiring sports rights and comply with the latest standards, such as ST 2110, to retain and grow global interest. The transformation in sports production workflows brought about by SMPTE ST 2110 has enhanced flexibility and scalability by separating video, audio, and ancillary data streams over IP networks. This separation allows broadcasters to adjust workflows for events of varying scales without being constrained by traditional SDI-based infrastructure.

ST 2110 facilitates remote production and ensures interoperability between different equipment. This allows broadcasters to leverage existing studio infrastructure hundreds or thousands of miles away, further reducing the need for extensive on-site resources. This simplification fosters innovation to meet viewers’ expectations for first-class coverage.

As the value of sports content increases, broadcasting live events on a large scale becomes increasingly pressurised. Fans expect error-free, low-latency content, and broadcasters must meet these high standards. Achieving this requires thorough preparation, the right tools, and quality technology. However, the process is ever-evolving, driven by growing viewer demands, leading to greater delivery complexity. Broadcasters must stay adaptable and innovative, continually refining their workflow systems to meet rising expectations.

Greg Doggett is SVP of global channels and sports at Telestream