As the sports streaming industry increasingly moves from traditional broadcasting to digital streaming, there are a number of challenges that organisations across the media industry are juggling. On Episode 29 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast we spoke to Fabio Gallo, the General Manager of Europe and Asia at ViewLift, about his insights into the topic. Here’s what he said: 

What is the impact of this shift from traditional broadcasting to streaming within the sports industry? 

There is a huge transformation right now in the market. The biggest transformation is from traditional distribution, which was mainly business-to-business, to a more business-to-consumer or even direct-to-consumer model. What’s helping lots of our players there, like entertainment broadcasters and sports organisations, to transport content digitally around video streaming platforms. 

I think the big challenge for broadcasters is to not only focus on video quality or the technologies around the streaming platform. There are many things that have to be taken into consideration, from marketing to pricing or business strategies. There needs to be an understanding of the average revenue per user, how you can improve your quality of services, and how you can get better at understanding consumer behaviour. 

Offering personalised content is clearly very important. Companies like us can help those companies to make something very different from what they currently do, not just from a tech perspective but even from a strategy perspective or marketing perspective. Smaller companies or organisations probably don’t have the resources to do things alone. We help companies like that launch different solutions in different markets because every market is different. We can help companies according to the geolocation or market registration.

What are some of the challenges being faced by the sports streaming industry at the moment?

The biggest challenge in sports organisations is balancing profit and loss. There are plenty of sports organisations out there – probably 60-70% – who have yet to launch direct-to-consumer video streaming services. That is a huge market, but at the same time, they’re tiny organisations. Relaunching a service is always about the product but also how much resources the vendor will put into it. What could be the marketing strategy? How can you set up your business strategy from a pricing perspective? How you can tackle the Indian or Brazilian market versus the US, UK or Spanish market? It takes so much expertise to help organisations thrive and to succeed.

How is ViewLift leveraging new technologies to tackle these challenges?

We are talking about artificial intelligence and blockchain. Everything that we do is our own IP, so if we talk about having a very strong recommendation engine that is based on machine learning algorithms that our team created to help companies that have thousands of hours of content in their video libraries. We are working towards different projects in artificial intelligence and working closely with many partners, from cloud partners to fan engagement partners and advertising partners. 

We also like to hear a lot of feedback from clients, so we need to have conversations with our clients on a weekly or monthly basis to collect information to use as a starting point for our journey. We have a lot of roadmaps depending on geolocation, because you need to understand what the struggles are in each country. Innovation is great when it’s in Western countries, but there are many areas where good quality video streaming is more important because you have to get the basics right first. 

To find out more about the changes happening in the sports streaming sector, tune into Episode 29 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast here. 

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