John Griffiths, CCO, Spicy Mango, explores how automation can improve both consumer experience and commercial efficiency

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Over-the-top (OTT) services have experienced huge growth in recent years, with revenue anticipated to reach US$158.84billion by 2024 - more than double the amount reached in 2018.

And it’s not just for superbrands; sports OTT is attracting many niche entrants as demand for sport on tap expands beyond the well-known mainstream players.

One thing that all sports OTT media providers have in common is the ability to effectively use automation in routine tasks.

A key area where data automation can be adopted to create a richer consumer experience is within sports OTT services. Sports data is viewed as some of the most complex and varied in the world – often because major sporting verticals are being consumed across hundreds of different countries, all speaking different languages.

So, the challenge of how to aggregate, normalise and enrich vast amounts of data to power schedules, leaderboards, players, events and venue information in real-time to the viewer is complex, but important.

While the process could be achieved manually, adopting an automated solution to standardise the common challenges related to data differences, authentication and reliability when dealing with a large array of supplying partners is far more commercially efficient.

There’s also a growing market to adopt automation for image recognition across certain sports. For example, in football where machine learning models can be trained to identify when a goal is scored, or when there is a penalty or a corner kick.

Rather than having a human watching the game and manually feeding the content management system with metadata at exactly the right time, technology can generate and input the information automatically.

And while there is still a way to go when it comes to achieving perfect interpretation for fully automation solutions within sports OTT and data, the ability to potentially save millions of hours of manpower - and in turn huge financial savings, is becoming an increasingly attractive investment.

As cloud computer providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and IBM are increasingly enabling AI and ML to become much more accessible for the masses, the ability for sports OTT services to harness and apply these technologies to the vast data libraries that have been accumulated over time, presents an opportunity to further enrich the consumer experience and in turn monetise the investment.

Where can sports broadcasters start?

The first steps to automation lie in current workflows and identification of the repetitive, time-consuming and low value tasks. These are the tasks that generally lend themselves well to automation as systems can be developed and trained with relative ease, enabling thousands of operations per hour, compared to human operations that may take days or weeks.

Metadata is an area in which AI/ML presents a significant opportunity to enhance efficiency and realise greater benefits; from inputting incomplete metadata and natural language processing, to enhancing existing metadata and generating subtitle files and automating translation services for cross border services – all of which can be trained to be delivered at speed and scale.

These improvements not only help businesses manage costs, but also help to generate revenue by reducing churn through a better user experience and enabling launching in new geographies more efficiently.

The benefits of adopting automation, ML and AI technology within the sports OTT sector to enhance the consumer experience and improve commercial efficiencies is evident.

In a growing market, where demand and expectations from service users is increasing, there are more opportunities for OTT providers to capitalise on the sports data they have access to, to gain a competitive advantage and achieve a greater return on investment.