Luke Boyle on OTT & the future of sports broadcasting
Magine Pro’s CCO, Luke Boyle shares his thoughts on the current climate and what he thinks the future has in store for sports OTT.
Magine Pro’s CCO, Luke Boyle shares his thoughts on the current climate and what he thinks the future has in store for sports OTT. Usually, at this time of year, we would be heading back from several international trips to glorious places such as Monaco and Madrid, having attended some of the biggest sports broadcast and OTT conventions in the region. This has not happened. It isn’t that type of year…
Sport stopped. It stopped. This has never happened in my lifetime. But then it came back. The players and athletes, when allowed out of their bubbles, continue to enthral and entertain us. Though this is in very few cases (well done New Zealand!) in front of full or even partial crowds. So how do we, the fans, get to view the trials and tribulations of our favourite icons and teams? The obvious answer is of course via broadcasts, live and on-demand, and more commonly via a subscription or transactional OTT service (I say subscription, as unfortunately, though it is coming, I am yet to see a profitable pure sports AVOD service).
One of the big discussion points of late has been how COVID has disrupted businesses. For the digital media industry, the reality is that it has expedited development. Within the space of six months, we’ve seen perhaps three years of user behaviour and technological innovation. At Magine Pro we’re now seeing a 40% average consumption increase across all our clients over this time, which was forecast over a much longer period.
Viewing habits have also been evolving. The younger generation doesn’t know what an EPG is. Outside of live events (which maintain their value) sport is no longer about sitting down on a Wednesday evening or Saturday afternoon and seeing what is on the sports channels. It is now about cleverly curated content, be it highlights, lifestyle content, archive footage, best-ofs etc allowing the fan to fully immerse and lose themselves building extreme fan affinity to players and teams alike. None so passionate as sports fans – let’s give them what they want!
One other thing that many people ask me, is sports OTT going to aggregate again? The simple answer is, yes. But it won’t be on a domestic basis. What I think will emerge, as DAZN, Eleven, Amazon, Facebook and of course Google is showing, is the international aggregation of sports content. Viewers anywhere in the world will be able to subscribe or purchase on-demand any sports event, series, league of their choosing. But we are a long way from there yet, although niche sports OTT services continue to thrive.
On a personal note, at Magine Pro we were delighted to announce our new agreement with Endorphin and the Croatian Football Federation a few months ago. Magine Pro will be providing the exclusive end-to-end OTT solution, enabling fans both domestically and internationally to view one of the fastest-growing leagues on the planet, live and on-demand. Read more about the agreement here.
You can also check out some insightful thoughts from our VP of Engineering, Robert Olsson on the technical challenges of surfacing live sports content, and how we have solved them here. Our Director of Marketing also highlights the key features of a successful sports OTT service here.
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To find out more about our OTT platform and how we enable our partners to deliver live sporting events, linear and VOD content to audiences around the world head here. On our experience page, you can find out more about our partners and the OTT services they operate.
Get in touch with us if you would like to discuss how we can help you launch a successful sports OTT service or to demo our services.
You can also subscribe to the Magine Pro e-newsletter and/or follow us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with our latest news, partners and products.
Sports OTT: Live Sports Streaming & Video Delivery
You just won the exclusive rights for a highly in-demand football league and are looking to stream the games live for your fan base. Question is, do you have the technology platform for sports OTT to make it a success as your fan base starts to grow and incoming demands increases?
In this blog post we look in detail at the technical requirements you need to consider for sports OTT, and share how at Magine Pro we enable our partners to deliver high quality, low latency streams to audiences around the world.
Media quality & low latency
There are many technical aspects to consider when providing a premium OTT service for sports, and in particular live sports where quality is of the utmost importance. With fast-moving objects, a high bit rate for High Definition from 720p and more is essential with 60 frames per second. This is preferable for big-screen viewing as with 60 frames per second, the transition between each frame is much smoother, which makes fast-moving sports content look frictionless as a result. And as it stands today, anything over 60 frames per second will not make the viewing experience any better.
Predictable low latency end-to-end is also crucial. Your choice of technology, protocols and architecture will ultimately affect the end-users overall experience. Each part of the workflow should, therefore, be measured to monitor latency. Latency below 10 seconds (preferably closer to 6 seconds) is a good standard to aim for, although to reach this may require improvement of the entire workflow, as latency is affected by the number of steps end-to-end.
Key areas to consider & address include:
- Assess what effect media ingestion (encrypted transfer), encoding and packaging, and the network have on latency overall
- The choice of media segment lengths
- Using HTML5-friendly streaming technologies as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) or Mpeg-Dash to give cacheable delivery
- Content delivery networks (CDNs) that can deliver higher volumes with more efficiency
- How the player handles buffering
Content Security
Content owners will invest a lot of resources acquiring media so that they can offer their users the latest live events and an attractive VOD catalogue. Most right holders today also require a certain level of security protection in an OTT platform to be able to acquire content from them. Protecting media from being accessed by unauthorised users involves utilising different tech and methods.
One method is Digital Rights Management (DRM), which can control the distribution of copyrighted works. Before content is streamed it must be encrypted and packaged with a DRM schema so that only authorized users and devices can play it back. At Magine Pro we use Microsoft PlayReady, Google Widevine and Apple Fairplay to do this. We can also enforce DRM key rotation in a given interval to take down any ongoing streams that might have been set up in an untrustworthy way.
The content license agreement you have with the right holder may also specify locations that are unauthorised to access content. Because of this, in addition to DRM protection, right holders also request that OTT platforms deny users access when connecting through banned VPN or Proxy services. At Magine Pro we provide all of the mentioned security techniques above to our partners.
You may also need to look at reducing the number of ongoing streams and devices per user account to maximise revenue intake and eliminating account sharing. This is particularly important when hosting exclusive live events in your service.
Scaling for demand
As your OTT service expands over time you will need to scale to avoid certain drawbacks, including loss of video quality, poor user experiences and increased costs affecting you and your customers. This can be challenging if you haven’t done the engineering work or built in the relevant monitoring.
At Magine Pro we run our OTT platform on AWS, which enables us to scale up and down as we require and pay only for what we use. Working with AWS also means during peaks we don’t need to set an upper user limit or traffic limit because of hardware constraints. This is a big advantage for us and our partners that we build OTT services for.
In an ideal world, you would be able to scale up when demand increases and scale back down when traffic decreases. Sounds easy, but services often require a warm-up before they’re ready to accept incoming requests and traffic. Autoscaling is good, but not great at this.
For live events, especially for pay-per-view, you should pre-provision your infrastructure to manage the exponential rise in traffic when the event starts. Autoscaling often takes many minutes to kick in, however, so it’s better to provision more, and scale down, than not scale up quickly enough.
With pay-per-view events, typically you know how many people have pre-purchased before the event, this early indicator lets you know how much you need to scale. However, you could also see an increase in purchases up to 10-15 mins before the event starts, so you need to build in some headroom to handle that. It can be a good idea to run a pre-event (especially if you haven’t delivered live before) to ensure payment flows are provisioned to handle a potential increase in traffic right before the event begins.
Your service operations team also plays an important role when hosting live events. It’s essential to have clear roles and responsibilities in place and also defined escalation paths, communication & troubleshooting routines between the event distributor and your platform provider.
Service testing & reliability
As an OTT platform service provider, we strive to have high reliability. To achieve this, we need to consider the architecture for high availability, what infrastructure and how we utilize AWS’s cloud infrastructure.
High availability requires more resources, which can compete with our aim for low latency (affected by the number of steps in the end-to-end flow). At Magine Pro, we provide flexibility here for our partners. They can select resiliency levels depending on the value of their content, audience size, live vs Video-On-Demand or accepted down-time.
The starting point is to look at multiple incoming signal paths; from the signal distribution (even down to power suppliers), all the way through to acquisition, transcoders, automatic failover and monitoring tools. Doing this enables us to achieve resiliency and to withstand certain types of failure, yet remain functional from the customer perspective.
Understanding our platform and our partner’s availability needs enables us to design and continuously test our platform using injection patterns. We can take down services to learn how the platform reacts and remains functional from the customer perspective. In this case, we also have simulated end-users or real users in a production environment.
You might think you have high reliability and resilience to handle services going down, but without really testing it you don’t build up a confidence level. We do this testing continuously and monitor the outcome to improve our engineering capabilities, to better handle failures, start-up new services, and to re-balance traffic over to healthy endpoints.
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To find out more about our OTT platform and how we enable our partners to deliver live events, linear and VOD content to audiences around the world head here. On our experience page, you can find out more about our partners and the OTT services they operate.
Get in touch with us if you would like to discuss how we can help you launch a successful sports OTT service or to demo our services.
You can also subscribe to the Magine Pro e-newsletter and/or follow us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with our latest news, partners and products.
Top 5 service features for sports OTT
OTT services can offer sports fans more opportunities to engage with content and their teams than is possible through traditional TV. For sports content owners, OTT services give greater access to the fans, enables them to capture more data and generate greater revenues.
At Magine Pro, we believe there is real value in creating an OTT service that offers more than just live sports streaming. In this post, we share our top 5 product features and capabilities for a successful sports OTT service.
The top 5 things you need to consider…
Engaging the fans
An interactive OTT environment enables viewers to engage more with your content and can help build community and customer loyalty. Boost fan engagement by integrating sports data feeds into your service, host interactive games or quizzes, add exclusive editorial content or even offer a targeting e-commerce experience for merchandise.
The bigger picture
The ability to stream content on the go is a huge benefit of OTT and particularly for sports where fans don’t want to miss a game or an event. However, there are some sporting events that just HAVE to be seen on the big screen. The challenge for OTT players now being able to offer a high-quality mobile streaming experience AND big-screen viewing via smart TV apps and/or media player support.
Sports on-demand
As the sporting calendar fluctuates, entice users back into your service during downtime with engaging VOD libraries. You could even create dedicated categories of content that relate to great sporting moments or that celebrate great sportsmen and women. The key here is to keep communicating with your users via push notifications and email so that they are aware when new content and features are available.
Exclusive content, promos & partnerships
When the live sporting events you’re hosting are also available elsewhere, supplement with value-add content such as behind-the-scenes editorial or unique VOD to stand out from the competition. You can even extend marketing efforts with exclusive promo codes or by partnering with relevant brands to create offers that will draw a much larger audience.
Localisation for global markets
Sports can appeal to fans across the world. If you’re planning to scale your OTT service, you will need to meet the needs of a global audience. Consider flexible business and pricing models (consumers in one country may be less likely to commit to a subscription model or price than others), ability to receive and settle in local currencies and service localisation and language (audio/subtitles) for select markets.
At Magine Pro, we provide our partners with the support, tools and technology they need to build a sports OTT service that includes all the features and functionality listed above. To find out more about our OTT streaming solutions, head over to our website or get in touch with a member of the team to learn more and try a demo.
Sports OTT: A new frontier for Magine Pro
It’s been a busy year at Magine Pro. We’ve attended some of the biggest industry events, including two of the most insightful in Sports broadcast/OTT recently, Sportel in Monaco and the Sports Pro OTT Summit in Madrid. Here are our thoughts on the Sports OTT market after engaging with the industry professionals and thought leaders.
We were delighted to take a stand at Sportel for our first time, and met with multiple rights holders, some who have launched, or dipped a toe in the OTT water, and others who are ready to go. Luke Boyle, Magine Pro’s CCO, noted a distinct move from those below the 1st tier (in regards to either geographic location or content) being ready to take advantage of a direct to consumer offering. He noted in particular how over his years of working in OTT the questions have changed. Questions like, “does it work and how?”, are now, “how do we monetize? what is the best content? which devices resonate greatest?’. He believes there is a more mature understanding of the requirements for OTT and the business positives. It’s not just revenues, but cross-marketing, fan interaction and engagement, new sponsorship activation opportunities, and more.
Sportel itself has changed, as the traditional rights sales market of some 25 years standing, is now much more than that. Conversations abound across the stands about OTT solutions and in particular, how to address the younger viewer (a problem for many sports). Similarly, multiple stands were showcasing their OTT ‘channels’ alongside their content for sale to traditional and OTT broadcasters.
At the more specific OTT event, the SportsPro OTT Summit this year, it was clear from the sheer increase of rights holders in attendance, that this industry continues to develop rapidly. Again many of the 1st tier rights owners and broadcasters were on stage offering best-practice advice. And while incredibly difficult to do, their thoughts on the future. The consensus is that OTT remains a game-changer, and continues to evolve, and live sports, in particular, remains a core driver. The questions are still, will we see aggregation? And if so, by who and how? Will there be global and local services? Niche content alongside premium or separate? AVOD or SVOD? – It seems the US is more ready for the former, while EMEA and most of the rest of the World (outside of huge Asian hubs) plump for the latter.
Conversations and debate around content were commonplace, short-form VOD, short-form or long-form highlights, and indeed live. There is no clear answer, each sport, each market, and each device requires thought and planning. Of course, the beauty of OTT means that analysis of success or otherwise is significantly more readily available. One thing is for certain though and was at the center of every conversation, there is a triangle of success (as we like to call it) – great content, great tech, and strong marketing. The latter is perhaps an oft-understated necessity for a successful OTT platform.
One of the more exciting outcomes to occur over the course of the events was Magine Pro picking up its latest sports client. Recently launched, we will be talking about that much more soon! Sign up to our newsletter now, to stay up to date on our latest news and to find out which industry events we’ll be attending next.
You can also find out more about Magine Pro video streaming services, and in particular how we can help you build your own OTT business, here. Head to our experience page to see our case studies and learn more about how we’ve helped our partners build successful and global OTT businesses.