AI has enabled the sports media sector to give viewers unparalleled access to behind-the-scenes and additional content. On Episode 36 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast, Elliot Renton, the SVP of Asia Pacific at Magnifi, joined us to share his own inside look at what’s happening behind the scenes of the sports media sector. He explained how AI is shaping the future of sports media, as well as sharing his predictions for how Magnifi will be helping to shape that future directly. Read on for more. 

How do you see AI shaping how fans experience sports, both live and digitally? 

I actually think we’re underestimating the role of AI in sports. I think it will penetrate every facet of the industry over time. It’s already impacting fan engagement and how we’re delivering content through the back-end workflows. Stadiums, ticketing, coaching, and players’ wearable technology are all workflows that can link together on top of what we’re doing in broadcast and social media. I think we will be looking back in a decade’s time at the role of AI, and as long as it’s been deployed responsibly and done in the right way, we’ll be looking at looking back at it as a transformative technology, just like the smartphone has been. Some areas are going to be slower than others, and you’re still going to need the human element, but I think as a technology for the sports industry, AI will continue to be very impactful in the future. 

What is Magnifi’s vision for revolutionising how we interact with sports content?

We as a business are about four years old and have grown from India to become a US-India business that’s doing some fantastic revenues. We work with some really great customers, like the IPL in India, some football federations in Europe and broadcasters. Earlier this year, we launched our US operations on a commercial level and are seeing explosive growth in that. The third pillar has been Asia in the last few months. We have to target the APAC market in a very different way because of its fragmented nature. But, technology-wise, we have a vision to provide AI solutions that can deliver content from the field of play to consumers working B2B with different businesses to understand their challenges. And we’re looking at how to venture into other content areas as well. 

In sports, we provide a set of solutions that are more flexible, affordable, and very easy to work with as a technology. What we’re fundamentally doing is asking business leaders, ‘How can you harness this AI-driven revolution and create more meaningful connections with your fans?’ There’s been a lot of talk about personalisation, but how you package that up from platform to platform will vary. So will the way that you harness the data that comes from that. We share data sets with all of our customers, and they can mix that up with their first-party data. 

Sports businesses in general are behind the curve when it comes to harnessing data. This is spoken about at events that we all go to all the time, but I think the opportunities around that are vast, both from a fan engagement point of view and an advertising or sponsorship point of view. We’re challenging business leaders to think about how they will bring technology into the fold, but we’re coming at it in a very flexible and easy manner. We’re asking, ‘How can you deploy that? How can you connect that to your existing thing? What technologies do you have to drive growth?’ That creates really exciting discussions. 

In this part of the world – certainly in APAC, where people are not quite sure what they want to do – we play a bit more of a consultative role. Then we have other customers who are very clear on what they want to do and how they want to deploy technology, and then it’s up to us to try and win that business. So there are some creative things going on in the sports industry, especially in this part of the world as well as in Europe, the UK and the US, where there are some really exciting developments happening too. 

To hear more from Elliot, tune into Episode 36 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast here.

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.