2020 Shortlist

FloSports is a leading sports OTT broadcast aggregator focusing on underserved sports. From From Olympic wrestling, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, dirt-track racing and specialty motorsports, cycling, cheerleading and more, FloSports’ vision is to give a platform and voice to the fearless competitors that are overlooked by other sports broadcasters.

LaLigaSportsTV is a unique OTT among rights holders, designed not to show the league’s own competition but a wide selection of Spanish sports and international competitions, giving them a platform that wasn’t available before. Through new tech partnerships, platform design changes and data analysis, the OTT has achieved a huge milestone of 1 million users in 2020, an unprecedented number for a platform of this kind. This underlines its success in creating an intuitive and memorable user experience for global sports fans.

In the four years since its launch in 2016, the Olympic Channel has produced more than 25,000 pieces of video content representing all Olympic sports disciplines and 206 countries, including 76 original series and films, resulting in more than 3.3 billion video views across all platforms. Key to the Olympic Channel’s fourth year of success was global coverage of the Lausanne 2020 Winter Youth Olympic Games as a worldwide digital rights holder. Continuing its upward viewership trend 2020 has been very successful in terms of traffic and audience growth, our platform keeps users coming back, with a 65 percent increase over the previous 12 months in monthly returning users (MRUs), one of the key metrics for the long-term success of the Olympic Channel. Our ability to continue to grow during the COVID-19 pandemic is a testament to the global appetite for inspiring, entertaining and compelling stories featuring Olympic sports and athletes and the tireless efforts of our entire team to engage fans with the Olympic values.

PAOK TV – Be a disruptor.

PAOK TV, the Sports OTT platform of PAOK FC disrupted the football TV rights in Greece by becoming its exclusive TV broadcaster for the Super League.

PAOK became the only club in Europe managing its own TV rights and broadcasting it through its own OTT platform. After its first successful season with more than 170.000 registered subscribers, PAOK TV was redeveloped and rebranded while becoming AWS Partner before entering Season II adding a lot of new features and engagement tools for the users.

Sportradar and Tennis Channel launch Tennis Channel International.

Sportradar partnered with Tennis Channel to launch their new OTT platform – Tennis Channel International. Accessible across a multitude of devices, Tennis Channel International has become the go-to for tennis fans, providing 24/7 content including live tournaments, documentaries, features, instructional content, highlights and select matches on-demand.

Launched to market in the midst of the global pandemic, Sportradar and Tennis Channel worked together to bring top-level, live tennis back to the fans by screening the Tennis Point Exhibition Series live on the Tennis Channel International platform.

Since launch in May, Tennis Channel International has brought fans 1,000 live matches, 250 hours of programming and nine brand new series. As a result, viewing time has increased 40% per session in the first three months, while the weekly usage percentage has more than doubled in the same period.

In 2014, WWE launched WWE Network, the first-ever 24/7 streaming network. Since its inception, WWE Network has transformed and reimagined how WWE delivers premium live content and 24/7 programming directly to its passionate fanbase around the world. Providing unprecedented value to its viewers, WWE Network features more than 11,000 hours of exciting, edge-of-your-seat content, every live WWE pay-per-view event, groundbreaking documentaries, reality shows, original series, in-ring specials and much more. With an enhanced user experience and the introduction of the Free Version in June 2020, WWE Network allows its viewers access to premium programming across the devices they use most.

mtribes – How Deltatre helps sports federations make better use of their user data.

mtribes is designed to enable any sports media operator and/or rights-holder running a multi-platform digital or OTT service to quickly identify user groups and their behaviours, create highly personalized user experiences, and measure the effectiveness of personalization through real-time insights.

The Eurosport Cube: Bringing Fans Closer to the Action.

Ahead of its U.S Open coverage for millions of tennis fans across Europe, Eurosport faced a unique challenge. COVID-related measures in New York restricted Eurosport’s ability to create and distribute content from on-site – the lifeblood of digital-first broadcaster.

How could Eurosport tell the story of the event and bring fans closer to the action if it couldn’t be there? And in a packed period for live sport given postponements earlier in the year, how could Eurosport stand out and engage sports fans on mass?

To meet this challenge, Eurosport unveiled a new innovation that observers immediately dubbed ‘the future of sports coverage’: The Eurosport Cube.

The Cube ensured Eurosport stood out from its competition and drove record engagement around its coverage of the tournament. More broadly, the new studio is already transforming the way fans and brands connect with sports and athletes.

Fincons Group’s SDP–Smart Digital Platform is a revolutionary platform which creates and publishes Sports content owner and distributor’s Apps, enriches them with advanced monetization models, provides contextual information and encourages greater viewer engagement enabling innovative interactive applications; relevant to sports league or team content but also to content distributed by broadcasters or cable companies.

SDP provides an unprecedented range of tools that effectively enhance the consumption and use of Hybrid TV (combining Linear and OTT TV) in the sports entertainment sector while measurably increasing fan engagement and enhancing revenue opportunities (based both on addressable advertising and third-party products and merchandising). The SDP is transformative as it is the first platform to be compliant with both the European HbbTV2 and the American ATSC3 standards and uniquely features, through cloud-based microservices, the full automation of the Hybrid TV asset preparation chain, providing novel answers to emerging needs.

G-Core Labs Streaming Platform introduces low-latency streaming, co-viewing of sports broadcasts, which works for tens of millions of viewers around the world. We use advanced technology to minimize the video stream delivery time, such as Chunked CMAF, HTTP CTE, Low Latency HLS, WebRTC, SRT. So, we have reduced the latency from 10 to 1–4 seconds.

An important feature of the streaming platform is its integration with the G-Core Labs CDN, one of the fastest and most powerful in the world, according to the Guinness World Records. The network infrastructure is represented on all continents and includes more than 100 points of presence in 65 cities around the world, has 5000+ peering partners, 300+ cash servers and the total network capacity is 10+ Tbit/sec. It is located as close as possible to the final audience, which has a positive effect on minimizing delays in live broadcasts and VOD delivery.

Real-time, scalable and synchronized streaming.

Phenix is the leader in real-time video solutions allowing for high quality, synchronous viewing at broadcast scale with less than a half-second of latency. Phenix end-to-end workflows capture signals at the source and provide real time encoding, ingest, transcoding, composition and content delivery to any device including mobile, browsers, connected TVs, set-top boxes and consoles with < 500 milliseconds of latency to millions of concurrent viewers.

Deltatre continues to represent the very best in sports technology and innovation.

We are committed to providing an exceptional fan experience, putting the power in the viewer’s hands and helping them get even closer to the action.

We’re proud of the innovations we’ve brought to market during an extremely challenging year. And we’re delighted that so many high-profile clients from around the world trust us to deliver best-in-class services to their users.

G-Core Labs has been developing its video streaming business since 2018. Today the global architecture of content delivery network located on 5 continents. It includes 100+ points of presence located in more than 65 cities around the world, has 5000+ peering partners, 300+ cash servers and the total network capacity is 10+ Tbit/sec.

This year G-Core Labs has made a big step forward. We re-launched our Streaming Platform that replaces the previous version of the product. Now Streaming Platform introduces low-latency streaming, co-viewing of sports broadcasts, which works for tens of millions of viewers around the world. We use advanced technology to minimize the video stream delivery time, such as Chunked CMAF, HTTP CTE, Low Latency HLS, WebRTC, SRT, and Low Latency CDN. So, we have reduced the latency from 10 to 1–4 seconds, which is almost 10 times less for ultra-low-latency streaming and 2.5 times less for low-latency.

Intel Sports is developing innovative, immersive technologies in partnership with leagues and teams to provide unprecedented personalized viewing choices and control, including the NFL, NBA, LaLiga, and several EPL and LFC teams.

Intel True View is Intel Sports’ volumetric video technology for data capture, processing, and production. This new media format enables infinite storytelling from one capture.

Intel True View enables our Partners to provide their fanbase with immersive media highlights of the best moments throughout the season. Using the volumetric capture method, footage is recorded from dozens of 5K Ultra HD cameras to create a virtual environment in spectacular, multi-perspective 3D, enabling fans to experience a moment on the pitch from any angle.

WSC Sports’ technology automatically creates and publishes sports highlights at a speed and scale never seen before. This goes hand-in-hand with our clients’ OTT offerings as we can supply sports content at scale and in real-time, allowing our clients to fill their content streaming platforms with unique and personalized videos, and deliver game-changing fan experiences to their subscribers. This has helped clients keep up with modern user demands of more content, in more places, delivered faster than ever before and with increased levels of customisation and personalisation.

We work with the biggest names in sports and broadcasting, and more and more new clients are looking to WSC Sports’ AI technology to help them with their OTT offerings, as well as automatically creating videos for their social media channels and other digital media.

Zixi provides a cloud based and on-premise Software-Defined Video Platform (SDVP) that enables reliable broadcast-quality video delivery over any IP network, any protocol, any cloud provider, and any edge device. In the current environment, sports content producers and distributors are confronted with many challenges: transitioning from traditional hardware-defined legacy distribution models to software-based solutions; adopting more economical public networks for transport; maintaining broadcast-quality continuity with remote production and engineering; and delivering content across an increasingly complex supply chain to a myriad of endpoints at scale with high QoS and QoE. Zixi can help them overcome these challenges and more with its award-winning SDVP. The SDVP is the unique integration of four main components: Protocols, Video Solutions Stack, ZEN Master and the Zixi Enabled Network. Each part of the SDVP provide unique capabilities and solutions that make live video distribution with Zixi unparalleled.

beONE Campaign from beIN SPORTS to motivate people to Stay Healthy at Home

CrowdAmp the complete fan-engagement platform.

CrowdAmp doesn’t just make the viewing experience significantly better. It directly addresses fan engagement by creating global communities where sports fans can share experiences. It brings real-life sound and video reaction into stadiums so players can see the real-time reactions of their supporters. Finally, by engaging viewers, fans and the players it delivers back into sport the value that sponsors expect.

CrowdAmp isn’t just a solution for Covid. It is built to sustain a long-term engagement with fans from all over the world and the sports they love.

FIA World Rallycross Championship Esports Series.

In the midst of worldwide lockdown, the FIA World Rallycross Championship, in partnership with Codemasters and Motorsport Games, was able to organise and produce six live eSports events crowning a Champion at the end of it. A world-class field including Formula 1’s Charles Leclerc, Shane van Gisbergen and Hayden Paddon as well as regular World RX drivers took part. Events were held on weekends where actual World RX events had been scheduled to take place and mirrored a full rallycross race weekend in just two and a half hours. Engagement online was incredibly strong and it was fantastic to give fans live sports and entertainment to watch during a time where there was so little available. There were over 1.24 million live viewers across all events streamed on Facebook and YouTube whilst they were also broadcasted on some linear TV channels including BT Sport, Ziggo, Supersport and Match TV with coverage provided by the official broadcast team of Andrew Coley and Neil Cole.

How the Tour of Flanders Created Its First Virtual Race.

Flanders Classic kept their annual cycling race alive with a virtual version of the Tour of Flanders by combining elements from esports and training bikes and broadcasting the event across television and social media through Kiswe. Using Kiswe’s platform, the Tour of Flanders event brought in live feeds from 16 different cameras: three virtual and 13 smartphone cameras of each cyclist from different locations around the world. The set-up for cyclists was as simple as a smartphone or webcam connected via WiFi which then sent an RTMP feed to Kiswe. Audiences were able to view a dynamic event with different point-of-views, scenes and real-time stats. Sporza, along with major broadcasters like ESPN Latin America, RTBF, NOS, TVE, Eurosport, Flosports and Fubo took part in showcasing the event to their audiences. Millions of viewers around the world tuned in to the first virtual edition of the Tour of Flanders–and perhaps the first-ever global sports event of this capacity.

In April 2020, following the difficult decision to cancel The Open for the first time since World War II, The R&A embarked on an ambitious project to mark 2020 Open week with a highly entertaining and innovative golf broadcast.

The Open For The Ages mixed footage and audio from five decades of archives, with the winner decided by combining over 10,000 fan votes with player career statistics.

The project was highly complex: hundreds of research hours, a thousand hour’s editing, digital enhancements – including changing branding and removing players from key scenes – and all done remotely.

The result was a three-hour final round “live” broadcast, shown in more than 50 countries and available on TheOpen.com, YouTube and Facebook. The programme was watched by two million people and complemented with an extensive second-screen experience that included a bespoke branded app, ‘in-play clips’ on social media, live leaderboards, and highlights shows.

Dynamic Live Atmosphere Generator.

The DLA Generator is a fully automated and clever solution to create real stadium atmosphere at live football matches for TV channels, OTT services, sports leagues, clubs and federations. Based on live tracking data of the current live game, the automated audio engine always generates the appropriate sound atmosphere for any game scene in real time. The audio engine takes into account the size of the stadium in which the game takes place and the number of home and away fans potentially in the stadium. From a selection of hundreds of individual sound files, the right atmosphere sequence is automatically assigned to any live playing situation. In addition, the audio engine can be individualized for each football stadium and club so the fans feel at home as if they were directly in their stadium.

By using Deltatre’s DIVA video platform, BT Sport are able to offer their subscribers a unique experience that puts the user in charge. This in turn helps to differentiate BT’s offering, and demonstrate their commitment to innovation in a truly tangible way.

“DIVA remains a vital part of the success of our app on iOS and Android.”

– Jamie Hindhaugh, COO, BT Sport

“We use DIVA in order to offer a truly differentiated experience …particularly when we have multiple current games going on at once. It also fits perfectly with our innovation agenda.”

– Richard Northen, Digital Product Lead, BT Sport

Minute.ly amplifies the effect of video. We help publishers and broadcasters get the most out of their content by using AI-based algorithms that automatically identify the most captivating moments in a video. Two parts of Minute.ly’s product offering are “Highlights on Search” and “Stories by Minute.ly”. These products enhance a publisher’s appearance on Google search – using video highlights that are created automatically in both traditional horizontal format as well as mobile-friendly vertical format. The different formats ensure suitability for any device or demographic.
Highlights on Search and Stories by Minute.ly increase search engine conversion and promote visibility, as well as offering new real estate for monetization.

The SailGP App – Apadmi & SailGP. A next-generation app with a world-first fan experience, for a new global sports league.

SailGP partnered with the mobile experts Apadmi to create a world-first fan experience app that allows fans to truly personalise what they watch, bringing them closer to their favourite sport than ever before.

There is nowhere to hide in live sport – the pressure was on Apadmi to deliver an innovative, world-leading app that mirrored the technology, disruption and ambition of SailGP.

The mobile-first agency has built a platform that makes the Championship even better for fans, and will grow as SailGP does.

With over 1,200 data points, multiple viewing modes and 8 live streams the SailGP app is a first of it’s kind for fan-engagement within sport.

Sportradar and Tennis Channel launch Tennis Channel International.

Sportradar partnered with Tennis Channel to launch their new OTT platform – Tennis Channel International. Accessible across a multitude of devices, Tennis Channel International has become the go-to for tennis fans, providing 24/7 content including live tournaments, documentaries, features, instructional content, highlights and select matches on-demand.

Launched to market in the midst of the global pandemic, Sportradar and Tennis Channel worked together to bring top-level, live tennis back to the fans by screening the Tennis Point Exhibition Series live on the Tennis Channel International platform.

Since launch in May, Tennis Channel International has brought fans 1,000 live matches, 250 hours of programming and nine brand new series. As a result, viewing time has increased 40% per session in the first three months, while the weekly usage percentage has more than doubled in the same period.

UFC FIGHT PASS powered by Endeavor Streaming.

In early December 2019, UFC FIGHT PASS unveiled a major platform redesign utilizing technology provided by Endeavor Streaming. The redesigned platform now offers a better user experience with higher video resolution, all within a bold, new interface.

Subscribers can now enjoy a unified experience across all devices and operating systems. Fight fans can now discover desired content much easier through the improved search functionalities and stream higher-quality content as the platform upgraded to 1080p resolution.

A major feature unique and exclusive to UFC FIGHT PASS is the fight card overlay. While watching live UFC events, users can access the full fight card and athlete statistics without disrupting the stream. Statistics are updated in real-time, allowing fight fans to stay in the know during live events. Additionally, fight fans around the world can now watch up to three live events simultaneously by utilizing the multi-view function.

Endeavor Streaming’s technology allows UFC FIGHT PASS to offer their content in local languages. In 2020, UFC FIGHT PASS relaunched the platform in both Russia and Japan, allowing subscribers in these regions to access UFC content in their respective language.

Scalable, synchronized real-time streaming.

Phenix is the leader in real-time video solutions allowing for high quality, synchronous viewing at broadcast scale with less than a half-second of latency. Phenix end-to-end workflows capture signals at the source and provide real-time encoding, ingest, transcoding, composition and content delivery to any device including mobile, browsers, connected TVs, set-top boxes and consoles with < 500 milliseconds of latency to millions of concurrent viewers.

Simplestream App Platform.

How can smaller sports rights holders, federations and leagues stay relevant in the market and compete with the deep pockets of organisations that provide market-leading OTT services? This is what we do at Simplestream – raise the bar in terms of features and functionality and offer a wide range of cost-effective OTT services across the world-levelling the playing field allowing the little guys to have a seat the table with the big guys.

Our submission showcases some of the amazing work our UK team have done and demonstrates how our OTT back end and front end service offering could be used by any size business, to help them monetise their content and understand their customers better.

Streaming Global has invented the way to deliver near-zero delay live streams at World Cup scale using standard infrastructure and existing workflow while lowering conventional cost. Streaming Global’s delivery technology simplifies today’s workflow by streaming directly to cloud storage servers and avoiding the costly steps of server-side media processing. This results in a best-of-breed media delivery solution, and the only technology that can solve all three of the biggest pain points in the industry.

beIN SPORTS wanted to create a new way to build brand awareness and grow the audience of its flagship channels, beIN SPORTS and beIN SPORTS en Español. Due to the sheer tonnage of live sports in its rights portfolio, beIN sought an alternative route to reach and superserve its fans, independent of multiple system operators, and attract ‘cord-cutters’ and ‘cord-nevers’, when content consumption habits are evolving by the minute.

beIN SPORTS developed a free, 24/7 English-language LIVE sports, news, analysis and highlights network, beIN SPORTS XTRA, that would allow for a sampling of beIN SPORTS’ high quality content to be available in front of a paywall. The sampling of beIN SPORTS’ content through a free channel would satisfy a need to reach a broader audience and serve as a marketing tool to drive subscriptions to its flagship channels.

CrowdAmp the complete fan-engagement platform.

CrowdAmp doesn’t just make the viewing experience significantly better. It directly addresses fan engagement by creating global communities where sports fans can share experiences. It brings real-life sound and video reaction into stadiums so players can see the real-time reactions of their supporters. Finally, by engaging viewers, fans and the players it delivers back into sport the value that sponsors expect.

CrowdAmp isn’t just a solution for Covid. It is built to sustain a long-term engagement with fans from all over the world and the sports they love.

LiveLike Watch Parties and Community Engagement Solution.

LiveLike is delivering the next generation of fan experiences to live events, with a new interactive toolkit launched this year. Its integration with FloSports has shown strong early results, amplifying the power these tools bring to platforms looking to upgrade their user experiences quickly and seamlessly, without compromising on quality.

Revolutionizing fan engagement: LTN Live Video Cloud for the win.

The NFL Draft 2020 revolutionized fan engagement through a specialized remote production setup on a scale never done before. Over 500 live fan feeds, representing the 32 National Football League teams, were integrated into a branded team mosaic. The live broadcast mosaic was on screens placed behind the Commissioner displaying 15 fan feeds at one time. The NFL Commissioner was able to interact with the fans in real-time, building excitement for the viewers at home.

2020’s virtual NFL Draft set viewership records and deemed a success by the League and its broadcast partners. It was the highest-rated Draft of all time and the most-watched sporting event since the pandemic shut down sports. The event also drove attention to the NFL’s fundraising efforts, raising more than $100 million in COVID-19 relief.

The SailGP App – Apadmi & SailGP. A next-generation app with a world-first fan experience, for a new global sports league.

SailGP partnered with the mobile experts Apadmi to create a world-first fan experience app that allows fans to truly personalise what they watch, bringing them closer to their favourite sport than ever before.

There is nowhere to hide in live sport – the pressure was on Apadmi to deliver an innovative, world-leading app that mirrored the technology, disruption and ambition of SailGP.

The mobile-first agency has built a platform that makes the Championship even better for fans, and will grow as SailGP does.

With over 1,200 data points, multiple viewing modes and 8 live streams the SailGP app is a first of it’s kind for fan-engagement within sport.

ELEVEN SPORTS BELGIUM’s ‘2.0’ OTT platform launched in summer 2020, to coincide with ELEVEN’s Home of Belgian Football offering. The new platform, powered by Endeavor Streaming, offers live and on-demand access to world-class sporting entertainment in a more user-friendly and visual way than ever before.

LiveScore TV: The new home of free-to-air football.

In less than four months, LiveScore successfully launched and established a free-to-air live streaming platform that is already forcing the sports industry to sit up and take notice.

Capitalising on its standing as one of the world’s leading real-time sports updates and results providers, LiveScore identified a gap in the market to provide safe, trusted, reliable and legal live streaming for football fans in the UK and Ireland.

After just two months, more than 600,000 unique users (60% of LiveScore’s UK mobile app users) visited the LiveScore app to view a match, with individual audiences peaking at 147,000 unique viewers.

LiveScore will stream more than 1,000 matches throughout the 2020-21 season, underpinned by rights to 306 matches from Italy’s current Serie A campaign. The next step of development will see the platform acquire new rights and deliver content around the world, unlocking LiveScore’s global active userbase of 56 million users.

NAGRA for WATCH.HOCKEY – FIH (International Hockey Federation) home of hockey digital platform.

With the MyCujoo service shuttering, the International Hockey Federation turned to NAGRA to help create a new platform to be the ‘The Digital Home of Hockey.’ This new platform, called “Watch.Hockey” is underpinned by NAGRA’s ‘Sports as a Service Platform’ delivering on a multi-platform online, app, web, and broadcast strategy that will bring a unified service designed to raise the global status and popularity of hockey. From the first whistle on the 17th September 2020, the new platform features live matches, replays, highlights, videos, archives, news, articles, live scores, results, and statistics. The new platform will be regularly updated with innovative functionalities for all players, fans, officials, and media related to the sport. With such a wide range of features based around the sport, Watch.Hockey will allow field hockey to create a robust, data-driven, analytical approach to enhance their global presence, participation, education, and monetisation capabilities.

PAOK TV, the Sports OTT platform of PAOK FC disrupted the football TV rights in Greece by becoming its exclusive TV broadcaster for the Super League.

PAOK became the only club in Europe managing its own TV rights and broadcasting it through its own OTT platform. After its first successful season with more than 170.000 registered subscribers, PAOK TV was redeveloped and rebranded while becoming AWS Partner before entering Season II adding a lot of new features and engagement tools for the users.

A numerous services SPORTRECS provide for free to sports rightholders, the technology stack, the value provided for tier2/3 rightholders and fans globally make SPORTRECS one of the best new streaming platforms on Sport OTT market.

Frank Lampard: Coming Home is a six-part first person narrative digital first series using the head coach’s reflections on his first season back at the Blues. The entire series was produced in-house by Chelsea TV’s production team for The 5th Stand, the club’s official app. Creating premium Netflix and Amazon Prime style boxsets are a key part of the club’s video strategy to retain and grow its app user base. This really was a season like no other and we wanted to create a series that really stood out from the usual – and crowded – end-of-season review market. The series drove strong views across all platforms with over 350k app video views and 4.3m minutes of watch time. At the time of writing the whole series has amassed 1.7m views and 11.8m minutes of watch time on YouTube.

NEO Studios is a production company specialising in the creation of original sport and lifestyle programming. NEO has executive produced both series of ‘Take us Home: Leeds United’ for Amazon Prime Video, covering the 2018/19 and 2019/20 seasons.

Toumba Uncensored is a four episodes documentary about season 2019-20 demonstrating the importance of crisis management during a difficult and unsuccessful season.

Toumba Uncensored premiered exclusively on PAOK TV and was the key marketing tool for the promotion of the new platform’s launch.

It’s the first-ever Sports Docuseries in Greece produced by a Football Club.

UFC FIGHT PASS is the world’s leading OTT service for combat sports.

UFC FIGHT PASS, is now available in more than 200 countries and territories. Subscribers of UFC FIGHT PASS have unlimited access to live UFC FIGHT PASS prelims; live mixed martial arts and combat sports from around the world; original series and historical programming; special features; behind-the-scenes content; and in-depth interviews. Additionally, subscribers have 24/7 access to the world’s largest fight library, featuring more than 20,000 bouts from dozens of combat sports organizations, as well as every fight in UFC history.

In April 2020, the platform launched a series of new original programs including Fightlore, UFC Year of the Fighter, UFC Watch Party, UFC Fight Physics, Knockouts Only, and UFC Chronicles.

These six new shows are exclusive to UFC FIGHT PASS and include documentaries, animated shorts, and behind-the-scenes content designed to take fans deeper in the world of UFC, the world’s premier mixed martial arts organisation.

Wimbledon partnered with Rebel Ventures (a full-service digital strategy and content agency specializing in sports) to create a series of films that showcase an intimate view of the Championships by focusing on fans, told from their unique perspectives. These films were created with the goal of showing new fans why Wimbledon is different and reaching an extended pool of potential followers and subscribers to the MyWimbledon platform.

FIM Speedway Grand Prix (SGP) launched the magazine show “Talking Dirt” for the 2020 season, streamed live on their Facebook and YouTube platforms.

This concept was developed alongside Monster Energy to create unique content for a sponsor due to the loss of activations onsite as a result of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not just talking about the racing. It talks about the sport, the challenges and how we move the sport forward.

It’s a 30-minute show providing behind the scenes content like never before in the sport. Features include the best of Friday night’s racing, a look ahead to Saturday’s event, insight from four-time world champion Greg Hancock and Aussie icon Darcy Ward and interviews with the current SGP drivers.

There is also technical insight from SGP commentator Kelvin Tatum, as well as speedway news from around the globe and exclusive SGP and Monster Energy prizes available for fans to win by engaging with the show on social media.

Intel Sports: “Another View” Featuring True View on Bleacher Report.

With the regular NBA season postponed, Intel Sports collaborated with Turner and Bleacher Report to develop a content series featuring star NBA athletes in True View. Intel True View is Intel Sports’ volumetric video technology for data capture, processing, and production. This new media format enables infinite storytelling from one capture.

The 3 part series featured NBA athletes Coby White (Chicago Bulls), Luka Dončić (Dallas Mavericks), and Bradley Beal (Washington Wizards) across B/R’s platforms on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Speci_cally, Dončić’s feature received over 1 million views within the first 24 hours, while White’s feature performed 85% above B/R’s branded content benchmark.

(Source: “Bleacher Report x Latitude Study”)

Olympic Day Workout.

Every year on June 23rd, Olympic Day is celebrated to promote fans and people across the globe to stay active. The Olympic Channel’s social media campaign, “Olympic Day Workout” is an athlete-led 24-hour live workout challenge, hitting 20 time zones of the globe. Engaging fans with a deeper and immersive digital experience is a key area of growth for us, and Olympic Day Workout is a great example of this: our goal to connect fans with Olympians through non-stop online workouts resulted in an overwhelming response across social media: with 20 Instagram live broadcasts, plus 62 posts across Instagram and Facebook, the campaign generated 19 million impressions, 3 million video views and 120,000 interactions in a single day.

UFC FIGHT PASS Best Comebacks in MMA History Bracket.

In March of 2020, UFC FIGHT PASS launched the “Best Comebacks in MMA History” bracket on Twitter. The 16-fight bracket featured some of the most thrilling events in mixed martial arts history across multiple promotions including UFC, PRIDE, Invicta FC, Strikeforce, and Cage Warriors.

UFC FIGHT PASS tapped into Twitter’s “poll” feature, which opened each day at the same time and gave fans eight hours to cast their votes. The bracket took place over the course of four days, beginning with the quarter-finals.

Each of the 16-fights featured in the bracket are exclusively on UFC FIGHT PASS, who created a separate playlist for subscribers to easily access this content in order to cast an informed vote. Portions of these fights were then cut down and edited for social media and shared across all of UFC FIGHT PASS’ accounts.

LALIGA, CONTINUING TO LEAD THE FIGHT AGAINST PIRACY

LaLiga’s commitment to the fight against piracy is sustained by investment in technical and human resources, all of which is targeted at protecting the value of audiovisual rights. LaLiga has changed the traditional content protection paradigm and is personally taking responsibility for the fight as the rights owner. LaLiga is therefore taking on the duty of protecting its value with the aim of offering an audiovisual experience which is safe, unique and as comprehensive as possible.

NAGRA Anti-Piracy Services crackdown on illegal sports streaming.

A consortium comprising La Liga, Deutsche Fussball Liga (DFL), Nordic Content Protection, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) and NAGRA closed down an illegal IPTV streaming network based in Spain that served more than 2m paying subscribers worldwide. The pirate network was offering 40,000+ video channels and video-on-demand content covering a wide range of channels, sports events, films documentaries and series. The channels included premium sports channels such as La Liga TV, Sky Sports and beIN Sports. By consolidating data from NAGRA’s OMNIS intelligence database alongside that from all major stakeholders and OSINT, NAGRA was able to create a comprehensive dossier that gave basis to the criminal complaint. Although based in Spain, the successful operation shut down over 50 pirate servers located in various countries across Europe. Financially, it was estimated that the operation had produced EUR15m+ in profit although the damage to the content industry was considerably higher.

Synamedia Streaming Piracy Disruption.

Without the ability to detect, disrupt and take down pirate services promptly – and redirect viewers to their own legitimate services – operators and rights holders will struggle to stem the sports piracy tide. Synamedia has established an industry breakthrough with its updated Streaming Piracy Disruption (SPD) managed service.

SPD frustrates viewers of pirate sports content with a blend of defensive and offensive approaches, nudging them towards legitimate services, and boosting customers’ revenues. Its security tools and human operational intelligence teams disturb pirates’ food chains until the risk is greater than the reward, helping customers to protect revenues. With a single workflow across both broadcast and IP streaming, SPD provides easy and comprehensive security management. In addition, SPD’s verification mechanisms avoid taking action on false positives. SPD’s content leakage data helps to position OTT sports providers for future content licence negotiations.

Viaccess Orca’s Dynamic Watermarking Technology.

Viaccess-Orca is a leading global solutions provider of OTT and TV platforms, content protection, and advanced data solutions. The company offers an extensive range of innovative, end-to-end, modular solutions for content delivery, protection, discovery, and monetization. With over 20 years of industry leadership, Viaccess-Orca helps content providers and TV operators shape a smarter and safer TV and OTT experience. With its expertise in security, VO is also helping the digital manufacturing industry protect its assets. Viaccess-Orca is part of the Orange Group and the company’s solutions have been deployed in over 35 countries.

Novel Video-AI for Eliminating the Massive Piracy Problem of Content Owners on Social Platforms.

Videocites is a technology company with unmatched video tracking and analytics services. The company developed a novel video-AI fingerprinting technology that automatically and immediately tracks and removes all illegal copies of your content across the social networks, to provide complete protection for your VOD and Live content. Using its automated cross-platform immediate detection and removal of illegal copies, Videocites provides scalable, high-end services for leagues (e.g. Serie A, IIHF, EHF, etc.), Hollywood studios, largest OTT/streaming platforms, and other media companies (e.g. Turner Sports, Infront Sports, Kiswe, etc.).

ELEVEN SPORTS BELGIUM: New OTT Platform

ELEVEN’s ‘2.0’ OTT platform – launched in summer 2020 – cements OTT as the cornerstone for ELEVEN’s long-term strategy in Belgium. The new OTT platform, powered by Endeavor Streaming, offers live and on-demand access to world-class sporting entertainment in a more user-friendly and visually stimulating way than ever before.

ELEVEN have been working to offer fans a new, more flexible proposition since 2015. And the launch of its new OTT platform coupled with the acquisition of the rights to Belgian football in summer 2020 has seen ELEVEN dramatically boost the adoption of OTT in Belgium and become the largest Belgian paying OTT service in the country in the first month of launch.

The PGA TOUR and iX.co have been partners for many years; as the PGA TOUR’s business has continued to expand, so too has the partnership between the two companies.

Because of their long-standing partnership, and iX.co’s track record of delivering experiences that are both highly technical and fan-focused, PGA TOUR immediately turned to iX.co to build TOURCast. Ultimately, TOURCast is a data-driven and user-centric innovation designed with fans’ needs in mind.

We at Joymo.tv have the mission in protecting the Value of Sport for the Creators of Sport, the value of video content, rights ownership and broadcasting. We are all about livestreaming local sports. Athletes are filming their sport and, their fans and followers are livestreaming their content. Revenue is collected and returned to the content owner.

Dynamic Live Atmosphere Generator.

The DLA Generator is a fully automated and clever solution to create real stadium atmosphere at live football matches for TV channels, OTT services, sports leagues, clubs and federations. Based on live tracking data of the current live game, the automated audio engine always generates the appropriate sound atmosphere for any game scene in real time. The audio engine takes into account the size of the stadium in which the game takes place and the number of home and away fans potentially in the stadium. From a selection of hundreds of individual sound files, the right atmosphere sequence is automatically assigned to any live playing situation. In addition, the audio engine can be individualized for each football stadium and club so the fans feel at home as if they were directly in their stadium.

It’s Real. It’s Live. It’s Everywhere.

Smart, clever, humorous, interactive, engagement-driven & fan-based the four videos marketing campaign of PAOK TV, helped the new platform to gain awareness, new subscribers, to become viral and enhance the relationship between the fans, the subscribers and the platform itself.

It was the first time that the actual subscribers had the leading role with the star players acting as supporting cast in a campaign that highlighted all the new key features of PAOK TV.

Racing TV Cheltenham 2020 campaign. Boosting subscriptions over the Cheltenham week.

Cheltenham is the greatest racing festival on the calendar. Racing TV has been broadcasting the festival for 16 years to a base who have already bought into their unrivalled coverage. However, lapsed members and prospects are often content with terrestrial coverage on ITV or ‘in bet’ bookmaker coverage.

The advantage RTV has is they stream every race, live, on any device without advertising breaks, and exclusive coverage of the last 2 races, every day.

Our objective was to deliver a fully integrated direct response campaign showcasing the “epicness” and drama of the festival across press, digital, DM, experiential and social media, injecting a sense of FOMO around the Cheltenham Festival. The creative borrowed from the visual language of movie trailers, headlining with Watch every race, live and uninterrupted only on Racing TV’.

Record subscribers and consumption for NFL Game Pass International.

In 2019, as part of OverTier – the Bruin Sports Capital venture dedicated to enhancing the user experience and commercial value of NFL Game Pass outside the United States – Two Circles was engaged to provide an end-to-end marketing solution for NFL Game Pass in 181 countries and territories.

This focused on marketing execution – through data-driven audience insight and technology solutions – to grow the NFL Game Pass International (GPI) user base by servicing and retaining the existing audience whilst bringing new fans into the sport through the platform.

A highly-segmented, multi-channel marketing strategy – driven by current and potential NFL fans’ behavioural habits – helped GPI subscribers reach a record high by 2019/20 season-end, with paid subscribers growing by 15% year-on-year, and consumption by 9% year-on-year.

WePlay – UFC FIGHT PASS Digital Media Campaign.

UFC FIGHT PASS is the world’s leading digital subscription for combat sports and features live events, Pay-Per-View prelims, original content series, and the world’s largest fight library of over 20,000 bouts, including every fight in UFC
history.

WePlay won a competitive global pitch to drive subscriptions to UFC FIGHT PASS via paid marketing across digital platforms. Campaign objectives were established before the onset of COVID-19, which halted live action on the platform and triggered an unprecedented global economic downturn.

Despite this unimaginable context, a combination of smart and agile strategy and creative innovation has enabled WePlay and UFC FIGHT PASS to hit the original KPIs, doubling monthly subscriber growth targets and significantly improving retention, all at only a third of the anticipated cost per acquisition.

Fanatiz, the highest value sports streaming platform, is proud to participate to compete for the Best Startup Tech Company award in the SportsPro OTT Awards for 2020. Fanatiz is the only platform available today that customises the entire online customer experience for its fans, allowing viewers to select their favourite team and be fed unique details and updates ongoing.

Beyond the streaming: tailoring digital experience!

From Streaming Production to Digital Assets Management and OTT Development, our mission is to make the entire video life-cycle management more efficient and cost-effective for our partners.

Our innovative decentralized platform for scalable, safer and affordable video transcoding, together with our smart production and post-productions tools could have a big impact to the OTT industry, resolving many of the challenges that rights’ owners are facing daily.

We strongly believe that UX comes first, hence we specialize in creating fully customized end-to-end solutions with a dedicated strategy for each of our partners.

Founded on July ’20, HiWay Media has already successfully launched the new OTT platforms of the Spanish operator Footters (www.footters.com) and Italian Women Volley League (www.lvftv.com). Both of them are also using our DAM for the management and distribution of their video content.

Minute.ly: Amplifying the Effect of Video

Video content creation, acquisition and distribution is costly, and often publishers and broadcasters end up with a less-than-optimal ROI when it comes to video content. Video, however, is still one of the most impactful content formats. Minute.ly helps publishers and broadcasters optimise their users’ video experiences. The core of our offering is an ability to automatically identify the most captivating moments in a video. Our products compile these moments together in different ways to increase user engagement, monetisation opportunities and content distribution. Our offering is entirely automatic. All a publisher needs to do is focus on creating high-quality content once – and we do the rest.

Sportrecs traction, global scale speed, technologies and services provided for customers and values for partners make it one of the Best Tech Start Ups in the sport OTT industry of 2020.