It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a sports content manager today. The value of sports rights is booming (rising to $61bn in 2024). Innovative technologies—from VR to AI—are creating revolutionary new ways to produce sports videos. OTT, FAST channels, and social media provide new ways to reach audiences.
However, sports content management also faces unprecedented challenges. The traditional, linear broadcast model has been seriously disrupted. While fans still tune in to watch live games on TV, the way sports content is consumed and distributed has changed forever.
In a recent webinar with OTT.X, the Backlight team discussed some key content management challenges that broadcasters and content owners face today. Let's explore three issues sports broadcasters face and how they can be addressed.
1. Massive growth in content and data
Sports broadcasters are now generating and storing more content than ever before. For example, over the course of just one day, Major League Baseball networks can generate over 600 hours of live content (matches, interviews, highlight shows, etc.). Over the course of a year, they will generate petabytes of data.
This enormous expansion of content makes it incredibly hard to manage video in a meaningful way:
- What to save? What to archive? What to delete?
- The costs of storage rise exponentially as more content is produced
- Finding ways to use stored content is hugely challenging
- Editors and producers struggle to search for and find content in a timely manner
- Many struggle to maximize the value of the content in their libraries
Find out more about the impact of rising media consumption on media management in our latest Media Stats Report.
The solution
To tackle this challenge, sports organizations must invest in sophisticated media management systems and platforms that can efficiently store, categorize, and retrieve large volumes of data and content – ideally from multiple libraries in the cloud and on-premises.
Implementing robust media organization strategies streamlines content creation processes and enhances the overall experience for editors, allowing them to find relevant content quickly and efficiently.
With iconik, for example, AI analysis can be used to automatically generate metadata across all assets in an organization’s archive. Using these descriptive tags makes it easier than ever for editors, producers, marketing teams, and more to quickly find and surface the assets they need, even from huge archives.
2. Adapting to the fragmentation of audiences
Sports audiences are increasingly fragmented. People now consume content on multiple platforms and devices; different age groups watch sports videos and highlight differently and consume pre- and post-match videos via different media.
This means that the traditional mass media broadcast model no longer resonates. Fans expect content that’s tailored to them and their viewing habits.
The solution
To produce content for fragmented audiences, media organizations need workflows that help them to generate different kinds of content easily. Iconik provides a variety of workflow solutions that help do just that. With the iconik x Wildmoka integration, you can ingest live streams, transfer them to editing suites, review and approve videos, deliver them to different platforms, and more.
Iconik also helps you build media libraries of assets relevant to specific audiences. Using metadata tags, collections, filters, and other tools, users could dial down from large, mulit-storage archives to the specific content that’s of the most interest to a specific group.
Fans expect content that’s tailored to them and their viewing habits.
3. The expansion of channels
Today's sports broadcasters must navigate the expansion of channels for their content—whether OTT platforms, FAST channels, or social media. These channels offer a powerful way to reach audiences. However, the proliferation of digital channels and the growing popularity of OTT services mean seamless content distribution across multiple platforms is an enormous technical challenge.
The solution
By implementing robust asset management solutions that support integration with OTT platforms and social media networks, sports organizations can streamline content distribution processes and maximize audience reach and engagement. Via integrations with Wildmoka and Zype, iconik empowers content creators to find relevant assets and then repurpose and distribute them efficiently and easily to as many channels as necessary.
A better way to manage sports content
Sports content managers have never before dealt with the complexity they do today. The growth in content, the fragmentation of audiences, and the rise in new channels means they have more technical and information management issues than ever.
Your organization can stay ahead of the game by using advanced MAM tools to support content management, discovery, and processing. And iconik can help. The platform supports you with all aspects of media asset management, meaning you can spend more time telling stories that resonate with your audience.