The Cube is Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) state-of-the-art mixed-reality studio that was rebuilt, redesigned and revolutionised for Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, the tennis Grand Slams and for the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes – a new opportunity taken given it was the first time such a studio has been used for cycling.

Challenged with differentiating its Olympics coverage from 40 national broadcast partners, and to tell the stories from Beijing 2022 while operating under strict Covid-19 restrictions, WBD required a technical solution that maximised fan engagement and transported viewers to the event destinations.

To address this, the Cube was built from scratch with even greater ambition, integrating new software and motion graphics to push its technical, visual and analytical capacities – including the integration of Hawkeye data for tennis coverage – far beyond any traditional virtual set.

It engaged a record number of viewers for an Olympics 50+ markets in Europe as well as helped drive record streaming audiences for its coverage of the Australian Open, Roland-Garros, the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes across discovery+ Eurosport and GCN+.

Videocites is a technology company with unmatched video tracking and analytics services. The company developed a video analytics and protection platform that tracks any live and VOD content across social media, including all UGC/fan re-uploads (AKA Organic Boosts), and helps maximize the value of digital content.

Videocites is the Only company with the ability to track all Organic Boosts and translate them into increased revenue and actionable insights for better fan engagement and Effective Media Value.

Videocites MediaTrack is the first and only commercial product to reveal the complete video distribution and exposure of any event throughout the social platforms, and to substantially increase monetization for all the digital media value chain

VersusGame is a mobile game platform with millions of monthly players and growing. Pairing interactivity with culture, VersusGame empowers marketers and creators to generate interactive engagement and revenue through asking simple engaging video-based questions to a community who challenges each other in one versus one matchups to make the right prediction of a future event to win cash prizes.

The company asks to be considered for Innovation of the Year because our unique product has motivated Gen Zs to consume sports content in a form factor that is unique in gaming and stands to directly and favorably impact the ability for broadcasters to connect more consistently with a younger demo audience that has a short attention span and wants to feel more valued.

We believe that we can continue to satisfy the interests of GenZ consumers and the creator economy at whole while also inviting brands to tap into consumption patterns for their own benefit and we knew that the biggest challenge within traditional media was the fight for attention. Why did the winners in social media have to be at the expense of broadcast and digital media?

In the last 12 months the company made its service available to brands and media properties. including Billboard Magazine, UFC, ESPN, BuzzFeed, US News, Goal.com, Professional Fighters League and new properties are signing up weekly.

UFC would ask questions like HOW MANY TAKEDOWNS WILL NATE DIAZ ATTEMPT DURING HIS BOUT AT #UFC263 ON UFC PPV?

The Walking Dead tv show would ask questions like WILL NEGAN SHOW UP IN EPISODE 1113 ON AMC+

This gaming disruption will drive tune-in and revenue from the hard to reach Gen Z.

SuperSport Schools, is delighted to summit an entry into Innovation of the Year Award.

From extensive research, SuperSport understood that in Africa school sport is the foundation upon which sporting nations are built. As a result SuperSport Schools, a standalone subsidiary of SuperSport, launched a game changing youth sports broadcast network serving young athletes, families, coaches, schools and federations across South Africa.

Prior to 2020, South African school sport was live streamed on a small scale by multiple parties with mixed success. Content distributed across multiple platforms was undiscoverable, financially unsustainable with a large male sport bias. Tens of thousands of matches happening every week across the country, were inaccessible to the parents, grandparents, coaches, and players themselves. Commercial partnerships were sporadic and under-utilised.

SuperSport Schools has aggregated the sport people care about the most onto an easily discoverable and user friendly OTT App and social media ecosystem. Delivering live and VoD streams of school and youth sport using both traditional manned multi-camera crews and automated AI driven cameras.

Subscription is free to users and schools, with revenue derived from sponsorship and ad-supported streaming as well as early forays into ecommerce.

Having only launched in April 2021, the platform already has 183,283 subscribers and a total unique audience of 1,220,049. Over 15,840 hours of live school sport has been streamed, across 24 sports, 40% female matches, showcasing 6,500 teams from over 600 schools. It has fundamentally changed sport consumption in South Africa and are starting to roll-out the product in neighbouring countries. All with a sustainable AVOD driven commercial strategy.

The SPORT TV APP was created with the aim of revolutionising the digital presence of Portugal’s number 1 sports broadcaster. By creating a strong link between broadcast contents and digital world interactivity, this uniquely innovative case study has quickly become a national and international mark.

Major innovations:

– Dedicated Apps to each platform (iOS, Android, Huawei, tvOS, AndroidTV, Samsung, LG and web), focused on live channels and video-on-demand.

– Smart Info: a breakthrough feature available during live broadcasts, where segmented notifications and facial recognition technology augment the user experience, by issuing real-time statistics and unique personalised information of the athletes detected, using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence.

– Smart Call-to-Action: an algorithm that constantly evaluates real-time events to notify users to perform complementary actions when a specific event occurs. For instance, when a user receives a notification for watching a goal, he is redirected to another streaming channel (which is broadcasting with a 30-second delay) so he can watch the goal in real-time.

– Highly interactive features allow TV hosts to engage with the remote audience, by prompting spectators to send their opinions through text messages and participate in real-time polls.

– Real-time notifications – Match results of the main competitions and detailed statistic information.

– FORMULA 1 – Detailed information from the competition with major focus on gamification and engagement between users through Predictor F1.

An outstanding watching experience as well as better personalised content, led to higher rates of user attraction and retention. It has become one of the top 3 sports app in Portugal, both on Apple (4,6 rating) as well as Android (4,2 rating).

Major results:

– A growth of 11,200% in registered users.

– 14% of the Portuguese population.

– A growth of 85% in unique users.

– 40% of the Portuguese population use the app yearly.

– Gross revenue of +€1 million in advertisement. From scratch to 1 million.

Sky Sports is Sky’s leading sports broadcasting service, bringing customers some of the biggest and best global sporting events from the Premier League to Formula 1 and everything in-between.
Entered into the ‘Innovation Of The Year’ category, Sky Sports Boxing Vertical launched in the Sky Sports app for the Boxxer Series events in November 2021 and May 2022, which brought in more than 65,000 additional viewers to those watching 16:9 formats on traditional platforms. Average watch times for the streams across the two events were more than seven minutes per viewer, demonstrating a high level of engagement in the mobile-first format.
Sky Sports Boxing Vertical was conceived in line with our Boxing rebrand, and specifically to to appeal to a wider, younger and more tech-savvy audience, who are used to navigating the world though a mobile device. We wanted to bring added value to the mobile view, and saw this as an opportunity not to merely represent the coverage in a different aspect ratio, but use the aspect ratio of a vertical mobile frame to layer and enhance the coverage. We worked from the principle that mobile audiences would be well used to taking in significant amounts of information at once and leaned into this, displaying variously, and simultaneously, fight coverage, promo, stats, commentary and live shots. Added to the linear 16:9 coverage, we enhanced the vertical mobile feed with additional cameras, capturing an optimised vertical view of the fight, and live corner cameras, showing the reaction and emotion of the trainers at ringside, simultaneously along with the fight coverage. All of this was offered free to view on the Sky Sports App, giving anyone the option to watch Sky Sports Boxing in a brand new way.

Thanks to a pioneering agreement between MEDIAPRO, LaLiga and TikTok, the first football match in Spain and a major European league can be followed in vertical format on GOL’s profile on TikTok. A landmark broadcast for Spanish territory made possible thanks to the exclusive production in 9:16 format carried out by the MEDIAPRO Group in 4K quality and developed for ‘mobile first’. The broadcast included the adaptation of graphics and commentary from native TikTok content creators. A unique experience to impact new audiences and which has made an impact worldwide.

MEDIAPRO (leading audiovisual group) is submitting a candidature for the Innovation of the Year category following its continuous adaptation to new digital formats. The Group has taken a further step in its commitment to creating content to reach new audiences.

EE and BT Sport unveiled pioneering uses of 5G which re-imagine the experience of watching and performing sports, dance, music and theatre through virtual, augmented and mixed reality applications.

Using everyday devices such as smartphones, tablets and TVs, as well as the latest augmented reality (AR) headsets, the new prototypes enable users to take control and engage in an event from any angle of their choosing.

For example, rugby fans can take the experience of being at a match or event to previously unmatched levels with real-time, data-rich AR insights such as ball trajectories and kick distances. Boxing fans can bring fight nights into their own living room with highly immersive holographic videos which puts them up close to the boxers as they fight. Meanwhile, dancers, musicians and other artists can remotely demonstrate, teach and engage with students and fans using EE’s 5G network to provide real-time interactive experiences.

The prototypes were the first outputs from an EE and BT Sport-led project, 5G Edge-XR, which demonstrates how the potential of EE’s 5G network, paired with cloud graphics processing units, can enable consumers to view events in a range of new, highly immersive ways. 5G Edge-XR is supported by The Department of Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS), The Grid Factory, Condense Reality, DanceEast, Salsa Sound and The University of Bristol.

THE PLAYERS Championship needs little introduction to golf fans. It’s the PGA TOUR’s biggest annual tournament and features the biggest names in golf. For the 2022 tournament, as part of an ambitious innovative second-screen viewing experience, PGA TOUR wanted to add video highlights to its OTT platform TOURCast. These highlights would show each and every shot from every player, giving fans around the world the chance to watch ALL the action from the golfers they wanted to see.

The key challenge PGA TOUR faced was generating highlights at such a massive scale, with multiple shots happening simultaneously, and then incorporating the huge volume into TOURCast and syncing them so they appear alongside the right player and shot data, also available on TOURCast.

To deliver this innovative new fan experience PGA TOUR turned to long-time and trusted vendor WSC Sports, the global leader in AI sports video technology.

WSC Sports’ machine learning technology has been taught to recognize every golfer on the course and all actions of the sport. In real-time it tags, indexes and ranks every action taken and then automatically creates and distributes highlight videos.

WSC Sports automatically created highlights for a total of 25,454 shots, from 144 golfers, over the four days and made these videos available to fans on TOURCast within just 90 seconds of the action taking place on the course.

By leveraging WSC Sports’ technology PGA TOUR truly went above and beyond traditional tournament coverage. Giving fans the chance to navigate freely through highlights as they happen, of the players that matter most to them, setting a new standard for how golf fans worldwide will expect to consume the sport they love from now on.

The innovation displayed through this collaboration makes this entry a clear frontrunner for ‘Tech Solution of the Year’.

We enrich e-commerce connections and transform them to feel simple and personal anytime, anywhere.

At Vindicia, we take the work out of subscriptions, so our customers can delight their fans. We are fueled by nearly two decades of data and deep payment expertise that enable businesses to launch, scale, engage, and prevent churn.

Capturing reliable, recurring revenue is essential, but at Vindicia we know your fanbase aren’t rows on a balance sheet; acquisition is not the end game. Real life sports fans expect seamless, fresh, and unexpected experiences.

Vindicia removes the friction of management to empower sports subscription businesses to connect, innovate, and monetize as they build long-lasting relationships.

Getting new subscribers is hard. Losing them is easy. Retention is a complex business with ever-changing inputs that are more than many customers can handle. But to optimize revenue in today’s saturated subscription market it’s, critical that brands attack churn head on. Luckily, Vindicia Retain is locked and loaded, ready to tackle the beast of churn.

Powered by two decades of deep, cross-industry experience, Vindicia Retain leverages the most comprehensive experience and intelligence in the business, and focuses it on one thing – eliminating churn. An agile suite of integrated tools and solutions, Vindicia Retain effortlessly delivers precise insights and actions to ensure customers are always ready for whatever the market brings next. It’s a shockingly easy way to improve retention, optimize payments and experience, and unlock new levels of revenue and loyalty.

Today’s lack of transparency between broadcasters and publishers is damaging both sides, but mostly publishers. With no monitoring tools, publishers had no way of evaluating their broadcasters and their content production efficiency. That is all changed now with Videocites new Broadcaster Social Monitoring service. Better productions, better conversion, and better evaluation is now made possible, breaking the invisible barrier publishers had with how their content is performing and how to optimize expenses and monetization.

Spiideo’s automated sports video solutions are trusted by media rights-holders, leagues, federations, clubs and schools – all around the world. Spiideo’s fixed and mobile camera systems for both indoor and outdoor sports, feature automatic recording, AutoFollow, and virtual panorama technology that integrates directly with both Spiideo Perform (Analysis) and Spiideo Play (automatic production).

As a candidate for Tech Solution of the Year, Spiideo represents the changing shift in the media and OTT industries. Professional broadcasts have typically been reserved for the elite leagues and teams. But as technology unlocks this for other levels in the pyramid, Spiideo offers an OTT platform and integrations with existing streaming services for the best user-experience. From the same camera systems, rights-holders, leagues, and teams can also offer Spiideo Perform analysis tools for player and team development – improving the product on the field.

Spiideo’s technology is transforming the ROI that rights-holders require for creating the best experiences. By being cloud-based, Spiideo empowers these organizations to schedule and maintain thousands of broadcasts simultaneously. By installing Spiideo automated camera systems and using unique tools such as AutoFollow, CloudStudio Anywhere™, CloudControl, video overlays, and mobile streaming; they are covering events that otherwise wouldn’t be available for consumption.

As the leader in automated broadcasting and analysis, Spiideo’s solution is being used by organizations – such as the Gothia Cup, Dana Cup, Ringier Sports, and MLS NEXT PRO – to scale broadcasting to fans, parents, and friends across the globe. In a single week, for example, Gothia Cup was able to broadcast 2,000+ matches to 177,000 viewers by deploying 43 automated Spiideo camera systems across Gothenburg, Sweden.

This is how DFL made Bundesliga 2 (2nd division of professional football in Germany) available to international OTT audiences with the help of a cost-effective remote production in the AWS cloud. As a result, international broadcasts almost doubled (+98%) and international reach almost quadrupled (+189%) compared to the previous season. For Bundesliga season 2021/22, DFL started to offer all 306 Bundesliga 2 (2nd division) matches plus the relegation play-offs as ready-to-air live streams worldwide. The workflow behind this service is likewise entirely new: DFL’s host broadcaster Sportcast streams the Bundesliga 2 basic signal into the AWS cloud, where match data collected by DFL subsidiary Sportec Solutions AG are added as graphics automatically. While in the past media partners had to invest significant effort to create team lineups, player names or graphics of match stats to add to the transmitted signal, these production processes can now be automated and performed centrally in real time by DFL. This is accomplished by using comprehensive match event and tracking information which is collected in Bundesliga 2 as in Bundesliga matches, and with the support of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the provider of the world’s most extensive and popular cloud platform. English live commentary is added to 2 matches per round with the help of a cloud-based remote commentary solution provided by TVU which helps to synchronize video and audio and add the English voices of Bundesliga 2 commentators to the live stream.

As TV distribution continues to be transformed by the Internet, TV advertising no longer meets the needs of consumers, advertisers or broadcasters. Consumers want advertising which is personalized and relevant to them; advertisers want to apply digital targeting and measurement and the ability to reach younger and specific audiences, while broadcasters need a unified platform to trade all of their advertising inventory in a scalable and automated way. All of this has to work with the viewer being at the centre of an immersive, non-intrusive experience across multiple screens and devices.

Sports OTT leader DAZN have, in partnership with Google, is building a fully “addressable and programmatic TV sales house of the future”, solving all of these industry problems, while delivering a seamless experience for their viewers.

DAZN’s solution relies on 3 components:

1) Dynamic Ad Insertion from Google supports seamless insertion of advertising at live TV scale – with millions of ad impressions stitched for multiple DAZN sports matches globally every week. Using the Early Ad Break Notifications system, DAZN is able to distribute the load and ensure that all ad breaks are filled as planned with commercial and non-commercial elements

2) Google Ad Manager enables the live ad breaks to be curated, using the Ad Break Templates feature to support compliance bumpers and other logic to fill ad slots in the most optimal way

3)ADZN – DAZN’s proprietary ad inventory platform allows for forecasting and order management of all addressable and non-addressable advertising inventory for a unified sales, operations and reporting process

Buzzer is a mobile-first platform delivering short-form access to the best moments in live sports, making it easier for fans to consume live sports.

Buzzer has advanced the sports media industry by improving access to live sports and where and how next-generation fans are watching. Our technology aligns with evolving consumption habits of Gen Z and mobile-first sports fans with hyper-personalized notifications, short-form live formats, and multi-sport strategy, driving fans back to the live window. Simultaneously, Buzzer is helping rights holders engage with new and younger audiences that are mobile-first. Buzzer has modeled its business to be partner-centric and complementary, helping to improve discoverability of content to drive cross-sport engagement, develop net new audiences and increase revenue for its partners.

Buzzer continues to improve the fan experience by leveraging data to serve as the last mile tech connecting fans to ephemeral live sports moments. Through its unique and innovative product and by partnering with the top leagues in professional sports, Buzzer identifies ‘lightning in a bottle’ moments in live sports so fans never have to miss the moments that matter most to them.

TennisONE is the first media group in history to showcase the entire NCAA Division I Tennis Championships—live streaming the first ball to the last—including the team, individual, and doubles finals, all on ONE platform, and at no cost to fans. This required extensive coordination with 27 different host sites, and only three days to prepare between the selection show and the first-round matches. TennisONE ingested 184 different camera feeds from multiple streaming and scoring platforms, to showcase 128 college teams across the country. On a single day during the first round, TennisONE live streamed 134 different tennis matches, and ultimately broadcast an unprecedented 536,000 hours of live streams in total. Fans were able to enjoy the live tennis on multiple viewing devices including iOS, Android, iPad, Mac App, TennisONE.com, and Airplay screen mirror to tv.

Additionally, TennisONE featured exclusive CrowdLIVE events, where fans could interact face-to-face with commentators, coaches, and players, about the match action. TennisONE featured a weekly show leading up to the Championships, called the “Road to Champaign.” TennisONE also showcased the highly anticipated Stanford vs. Baylor matchup during the Super Regionals inside CrowdLIVE. Fans got to watch the match and interact with celebrity host commentators such as tennis legend Patrick McEnroe and Dick Gould, one of the most famous college coaches of all time.

At its annual meeting in June, the NCAA Division 1 Men’s and Women’s Tennis Committee “applauded TennisONE for providing exemplary championship coverage.”

TennisONE was proud to achieve unprecedented app store rankings during the NCAA D1 Tennis Championships, rising to #19 on the charts, higher than Fox Sports, and even the Official Roland-Garros App—during Roland Garros.

THE PLAYERS Championship needs little introduction to golf fans. It’s the PGA TOUR’s biggest annual tournament and features the biggest names in golf. For the 2022 tournament, as part of an ambitious innovative second-screen viewing experience, PGA TOUR wanted to add video highlights to its OTT platform TOURCast. These highlights would show each and every shot from every player, giving fans around the world the chance to watch ALL the action from the golfers they wanted to see.

The key challenge PGA TOUR faced was generating highlights at such a massive scale, with multiple shots happening simultaneously, and then incorporating the huge volume into TOURCast and syncing them so they appear alongside the right player and shot data, also available on TOURCast.
To deliver this innovative new fan experience PGA TOUR turned to long-time and trusted vendor WSC Sports, the global leader in AI sports video technology.

WSC Sports’ machine learning technology has been taught to recognize every golfer on the course and all actions of the sport. In real-time it tags, indexes and ranks every action taken and then automatically creates and distributes highlight videos.

WSC Sports automatically created highlights for a total of 25,454 shots, from 144 golfers, over the four days and made these videos available to fans on TOURCast within just 90 seconds of the action taking place on the course.

By leveraging WSC Sports’ technology PGA TOUR truly went above and beyond traditional tournament coverage. Giving fans the chance to navigate freely through highlights as they happen, of the players that matter most to them, setting a new standard for how golf fans worldwide will expect to consume the sport they love from now on.

The game changing experience for fans displayed through this collaboration makes this entry a clear frontrunner for ‘Best User Experience’.

The R&A group of companies was formed in 2004 to take on The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews’ responsibilities for governing the Rules of Golf, staging The Open, golf’s original championship, and developing the sport.

In 2022, The Open staged the 150th playing of the championship at the home of golf, St. Andrews. It was the 30th time that the historic Old Course hosted the world’s biggest and most popular golf event.

Unprecedented demand to attend this historic milestone for The Open led to more than 1.3 million applications in the ticket ballot and resulted in the highest-ever number of general admission tickets being issued to fans, with 290k spectators witnessing the action.

To celebrate this landmark staging of The Open, we were intent on providing an innovative and unrivalled experience for our fans across our digital
platforms.

Key to this enhanced user experience was the introduction of ‘ShotView’ – an enhanced data-driven platform where every shot from The Open was rendered on to a 3D digital twin of the Old Course, allowing fans to follow every shot from every player at The 150th Open in real time.

ShotView helped generate record digital engagement during Championship week, doubling a number of key metrics from the 2021 event, with significant impacts on both average session duration and pages per session.

The SPORT TV APP was created with the aim of revolutionising the digital presence of Portugal’s number 1 sports broadcaster. By creating a strong link between broadcast contents and digital world interactivity, this uniquely innovative case study has quickly become a national and international mark.

Major innovations:

– Dedicated Apps to each platform (iOS, Android, Huawei, tvOS, AndroidTV, Samsung, LG and web), focused on live channels and video-on-demand.

– Smart Info: a breakthrough feature available during live broadcasts, where segmented notifications and facial recognition technology augment the user experience, by issuing real-time statistics and unique personalised information of the athletes detected, using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence.

– Smart Call-to-Action: an algorithm that constantly evaluates real-time events to notify users to perform complementary actions when a specific event occurs. For instance, when a user receives a notification for watching a goal, he is redirected to another streaming channel (which is broadcasting with a 30-second delay) so he can watch the goal in real-time.

– Highly interactive features allow TV hosts to engage with the remote audience, by prompting spectators to send their opinions through text messages and participate in real-time polls.

– Real-time notifications – Match results of the main competitions and detailed statistic information.

– FORMULA 1 – Detailed information from the competition with major focus on gamification and engagement between users through Predictor F1.

An outstanding watching experience as well as better personalised content, led to higher rates of user attraction and retention. It has become one of the top 3 sports app in Portugal, both on Apple (4,6 rating) as well as Android (4,2 rating).

Major results:

– A growth of 11,200% in registered users.

– 14% of the Portuguese population.

– A growth of 85% in unique users.

– 40% of the Portuguese population use the app yearly.

– Gross revenue of +€1 million in advertisement. From scratch to 1 million.

Forza FC is a dynamic technology firm with strong roots in developing exceptional digital products, including the Forza Football live score app downloaded by more than 15M fans across the world and used daily by 1.5 million users. Our focus is working with leading clubs and organisations in the football industry to develop best in class OTT solutions that deliver next level experience to fans whilst enabling clubs to establish new revenue streams and to increase the quality of customer data they collect.

Our entry is for the Best User Experience. The focus of our entry is the OTT platform AIK+.A key motivation behind our entry is to recognise the incredible work done by members of our team working under exceptional circumstances. 80% of the team responsible are based in Ukraine. During the invasion of Ukraine they have built, released and continued to improve a new OTT app and website for AIK, the biggest team in Sweden. Upon release the app was the top grossing entertainment app in Sweden, has received a 4.9 rating on iOS and android from over 1500 reviews, and has created a significant new revenue source for the club generating an average revenue per user per month of over $2. This has been achieved while developers have been running to bomb shelters day and night. It has become a normality to pause meetings because of bomb alarms. The team’s commitment, drive and enthusiasm is incredibly inspiring.

The BT Sport cricket timeline on our app platforms is a new frontier for viewer interaction and experience within the live sports viewing world. Designed with extensive customer input and with a primary focus on ease of use, it has already helped transform customer expectations for how cricket, and test cricket in particular, can be consumed on app platforms. As customer expectations and technology continues to develop, the onus is on broadcasters to continue pushing the envelope on how sport can be consumed. We believe this timeline is a perfect example of combining modern device capabilities across both small and large screens, with real customer demands when watching live sport.

The YES Network, the most-watched regional sports network in the US, launched its self-built live-streaming mobile app, the YES App, in March 2021. The YES App provides subscribers with a live stream of the YES Network, which included New York Yankees, Brooklyn Nets, New York City FC, and New York Liberty games. The YES App has seen a year-over-year increase of unique-per-game viewership for Yankees games of 35% in 2022 and saw a 240% year over year increase in 2021 over its previous streaming partner.

The interactive graphic overlays built using Evertz Ease Live SaaS (software-as –a-service), takes the fan experience to another level by engaging fans with dynamic and personalized storytelling content on top of the live stream as a single-screen experience. Fans can access live game stats, polls, quizzes and facts without leaving the live video stream and app. The YES App additional features include: watch parties, where fans can invite their friends to a live video chat as they watch the game (fully synchronized for all participants); and its free-to-play, Pick-N-Play Live, that allows fans to make in-game predictions without leaving the live video stream.

Each new interactive overlay feature was methodically introduced across multiple Yankee and Nets seasons. The Yankee baseball season runs from March to October and the Nets season goes from November to April. This approach enabled YES and their creative teams to build unique experiences for different fan bases and sports while maintaining a stats, watch, and play philosophy.

The interactivity of the YES App, have helped bring larger audiences, where daily user registrations are up 45% year-over-year season to date; the total number hours viewed on the app is up 83%; unique viewers per game have climbed 33%; and the time spent per unique viewer has risen 10%. The increased engagements have provided YES Network with increased revenues with additional advertising units for each of the interactive overlay they add.

In today’s media ecosystem, Social Piracy is the most dominant type of piracy, accelerated by Covid and fueled mainly by the ease-of-access of the social platforms. It is rapidly growing at 40%+ Y/Y rate and creating a need for a next-generation type of technology that can manage the scale of the problem and the massive loss it is creating.

Videocites developed a proprietary video-AI fingerprinting technology that automatically tracks all copies of content multiplying across social networks, enabling Discover – a complete, automatic content protection and monetization service for VOD and Live content, which performs instantly at any scale and is immune to all manipulations.

Videocites Discover is proven to be the only technology with the scale, speed and accuracy required to detect all copies immediately and remove them before they create a real loss for the rights holders, pushing viewers towards conversion on legitimate platforms.

Illegal IPTV networks are a significant problem for the live sports video industry. Service providers and rights holders are losing up to $28.3 billion in revenue annually due to sports piracy.

Viaccess-Orca (VO), a global leader providing OTT and TV platforms, content protection, and advanced data solutions, is helping operators protect their premium content and revenues during live sports events with its Anti-Piracy Services. Anti-Piracy Services from VO offer a revolutionary new approach to fighting video piracy across all mediums, including on illegal IPTV networks. With Anti-Piracy Services, operators can identify the most impactful illegal IPTV networks during live sports events through 24/7 web crawling, identification of piracy sources, and real-time automated monitoring and ML-based data collection. What’s especially innovative about VO’s Anti-Piracy Services is its automated ML data collection capabilities, that help identify illegal IPTV services faster than ever.

VO’s Anti-Piracy Services are backed by a dedicated, global team of experts fluent in video security, investigation, ISO-certified security auditing, and legal prosecution.

VO’s Anti-Piracy Services have successfully been deployed by operators globally, including Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), the governing body that runs the major professional football leagues in France. By joining forces with VO, LFP has successfully identified, monitored, and taken countermeasures against the illegal redistribution of Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 matches. VO’s Anti-Piracy Services enabled LFP to achieve the first legal blocking order for an illegal IPTV service in France, representing a groundbreaking achievement for operators fighting piracy during live sports events.

LaLiga Content Protection, part of LaLiga Tech, has further established itself as a leading provider of antipiracy technologies for live and VOD content, passing milestones this year of 20 international clients, 70 partnerships with leading online companies and €9 billion in the value of media rights protected.

Its proprietary technology is a candidate for ‘Best in Anti-Piracy’ as it is the only platform that combines monitoring of all online platforms, analysis of threats and removal of content, all in one place. Through a new ‘one-to-one’ service model, each client receives a dedicated team of analysts who provide 24/7 monitoring and ongoing consultancy about new piracy trends, platforms and methods for improving the value of media rights. Alongside this, its international public affairs experts successfully drive new regulations that remove legal and technical barriers to removing and penalizing pirate activities.

On top of achieving major business growth this year, LaLiga Content Protection has also increased the success rate of its platform. Across its entire client base, thousands of illegal apps, streams or products have been detected and 98% of this content has been successfully removed.

To ensure it stays at the forefront of piracy threat detection, LaLiga Content Protection has also launched an intelligence unit this year to investigate new sources of piracy and acts of infiltration within groups or forums, collaborating with its cybersecurity department to detect any type of vulnerability that allows content to be stolen or broadcast without authorization. Since the launch of this unit, new technologies and sources of piracy have been detected and fought, as well as large security breaches of content from some of the largest sports competitions in the world.

The use of hijacked residential IP addresses is the latest way that pirate viewers are circumventing VPN blocking tools to watch lower-cost or free sports content in other countries. For example, viewers in the U.S. who want to subscribe to the NBA’s League Pass pay $199.99 each year, while in India it costs 1,500 rupees or $19.

To avoid paying full price for this content, users can subscribe to a VPN provider who will give them access using a local residential IP address that has been obtained through deception or stolen during a cyber attack.

The number of these pirate viewers is rising sharply and now starting to impact streaming providers’ bottom line.

In an industry first, GeoComply has enhanced its GeoGuard VPN blocking solution to differentiate between a real subscriber sitting at home, and an unwanted user free-riding from anywhere around the world on someone else’s IP.

By blocking these pirate viewers, GeoGuard reduces the burden on providers’ infrastructure and CDN capacity and ensures compliance with their contractual agreements with rights holders, such as sports leagues. Maintaining these territorial licensing models allows both rights holders and content owners to benefit from exclusivity in markets.

This is why GeoGuard deserves to be a winner in the best in anti-piracy category.

GeoComply is a global leader in geolocation security and fraud detection technology for the media and entertainment industry. Its VPN and proxy detection solution, GeoGuard, is used by streaming providers, broadcasters and sports leagues around the world to protect their territorially-restricted content from geo-piracy and location fraud. Customers include Amazon Prime Video, BBC, beIN Sports.

Friend MTS, an Emmy® award-winning company dedicated to content, platform and channel security, provides broadcasters, pay-TV operators and content owners with best-in-class content protection and anti-piracy services. Friend MTS’s 4th Generation ASiD is an enhanced and extended set of subscriber-level watermarking solutions. ASiD addresses a wide range of content protection scenarios to secure high-value content and revenue across all types of broadcast and OTT devices, clients and apps to protect Live streams and VOD assets. 4th Generation ASiD includes ASiD OTT Edge-switched, a highly-robust server-side A/B variant solution, alongside ASiD Client-composited, the most widely-deployed subscriber level watermarking solution globally, protecting millions of STBs and OTT devices. ASiD 4th generation allows rights holders, content creators, broadcasters, and platform operators to quickly and easily identify the source of online piracy, and to take immediate action to stop piracy at its origin, thus securing revenue, reducing subscriber churn and protecting valuable brand and corporate identity.

DAZN is the world’s leading sports entertainment platform and has reimagined the way people enjoy sport since launching in 2016. Live in 200+ markets, DAZN has partnered with the world’s leading organizations to deliver live sports and original content to fans in a way that matches today’s evolving viewing habits. In 2021, 27,000+ events and nearly 1 billion hours were streamed globally on DAZN by subscribers across 100+ million connected devices.

Along the way, through a comprehensive program and multi-supplier approach, DAZN is hyper-focused on an industry-leading and ever-evolving anti-piracy strategy, aggressively contributing towards one of the greatest challenges that costs rightsholders, broadcasters and other key stakeholders billions of dollars in revenue every year.

DAZN’s dedicated in-house team is constantly assessing trends around emerging platforms and industry-wide vulnerabilities, activating an always-on strategy that focuses on effective technologies, far-reaching operations, and exceptional partnerships that discourage casual fans from consuming pirated content.

For instance, VPN blocking implemented across DAZN’s platform and directly on DAZN’s CDNs resulted in the blocking of nearly 80,000 unique piracy attempts during their first-ever PPV fight. Meanwhile, DAZN’s strategic partnerships delivered an astounding 100% compliance on 1,000+ posts removed on Telegram, the manual removal of 8,000+ live videos for rightsholder partners on social media, and six successful investigations into major pirate operators. Details are highly confidential, but each are now offline, with enforcement coming through law enforcement referral and raids, external party knock and talks, amd domain seizures and shutdowns.

While combating piracy directly through endless measures, anti-piracy is also at the heart of DAZN’s future business vision. As it ascends towards becoming an immersive and interactive daily destination, DAZN’s evolution is evolving it into a must-have and can’t-pirate for sports fans all around the world.