What began not so long ago as scattered experiments in next-gen enhancements to sports and other live content viewing experiences is exploding into a global trend driven by applications that can instantaneously leverage massive volumes of digitized assets to fuel user engagement.
This, in turn, is opening the door to new realms of monetization enabled by streamlined approaches to managing commercial transactions tied to these apps. We’ll be looking at that side of the app coin in a forthcoming article, but here we’re focusing on where this new era in user experience starts with technology that makes it possible to grab and use data at unprecedented scales in real-time synchronization with the core content flow.
“If you picture all the data that goes into a traditional broadcast today, we take that data into the cloud and make it available for the end users regardless of the device,” says Kjetil Horneland, CEO of Ease Live, the Norwegian company now owned by M&E production technology powerhouse Evertz. Utilizing the real-time aggregation and formatting capabilities of Ease Live’s technology, sports app developers “can go into an almost endless amount of data that we can surface to the end user,” Horneland says. “And then we can do polls and other interactive features “
These capabilities and the results they’re producing have vaunted Ease Live into the vanguard of suppliers to sports and other content producers looking for ways to expand user engagement. “We’ve done this for a number of different types of sports, both with leagues and regional sports networks – basketball, ice hockey, soccer, baseball, tennis,” Horneland says, adding, “but it’s not just in sports.”
A new strategy launched by NBC Universal with its TV broadcast stations in the U.S. illustrates what’s in store beyond the sports realm with capabilities like Ease Live’s. The initiative began this year with support for personalized broadcast experiences through NBCU’s NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) over-the-air channels on NBC- and Telemundo-owned stations in four markets. Along with enabling instant access to clips and alternative programming from the broadcasters’ news, sports and entertainment, the features include support for restarting programs when joined in progress; hyper-localized elements integrated into the TODAY show; and access to personalized weather information and severe weather alerts.
Results Talk
Users of the Ease Live technology are registering impressive results. Spain’s global soccer broadcast and streaming service LaLigua says its reliance on Ease Live to support interactivity allowing fans to engage in real time with instant highlights, live player and game stats, polls, quizzes, leaderboards and other features has led to a 25% increase in viewing time along with significant increases in advertising and sponsorships.
At IBC in Amsterdam, Austrian broadcaster Servus TV reported its use of Ease Live-supported overlays featuring stats, polls and other graphical elements with its streamed coverage of the UEFA Euro 2024 soccer tournament drew 62% of its viewers into interactive participation, topped by a 56% response rate to polls. At the same conference streaming technology company Bedrock, without offering specific stats, said its use of Ease Live technology to support enhanced UEFA Euro 2024 coverage by France’s M6+ had also led to a significant increase in fan engagement.
Stateside the biggest publicized splash involving Ease Live has been with the YES Network, which began using the vendor’s technology in 2021 to drive engagement with its coverage of New York area sports, including Yankees baseball, the NAB’s Brooklyn Nets, the WNBA’s New York Liberty, and Major League Soccer’s New York City FC. Now these capabilities have been extended through YES’s joint venture with regional sports rival MSG Network, Gotham Advanced Media & Entertainment (GAME), to MSG’s lineup, including the New York Mets, NAB’s New York Knicks, NHL’s New York Rangers, New York Islanders, New Jersey Devils and Buffalo Sabres, and, on occasion, the NFL’s New York Giants and Buffalo Bills.
While GAME has said little about its plans other than to note the recent launch of its Gotham Sports App as the catchall app for YES and MSG coverage, the partners have made clear their aim is to market their capabilities to outlets in other regions. “From design and content delivery across all platforms to ongoing management, technological and marketing services, Gotham Advanced Media and Entertainment is redefining the sports media ecosystem,” is how the only content on the GAME website articulates the agenda.
Pushing the Envelope in the Single-Screen App Arena
Right now Ease Live serves as Exhibit A in this surge toward next-gen user experiences, but the trend is pervasive, much of it building on home-grown as well as turnkey solutions where early successes have locked in producers’ commitments to these capabilities. These developments represent a big departure from efforts ten years ago that sought to achieve similar results by delivering personalized apps to second screens. Second-screen experiences remain part of the picture, but the game changer is movement of interactivity and personalization into the primary stream flow.
As described by Matt Duarte, vice president of strategy and business development at YES Network, the country’s leading regional sports outlet has been building on its use of Ease Live technology since 2021. The latest refinements YES introduced on its streaming app going into the 2024 baseball season were incremental but significant improvements that have been filtering into fan engagements with other affiliated teams as the year progresses.
One aspect to what YES did with Yankee streaming this year had to do with “revamping the look and feel” of the YES Watch Party feature,” Duarte says. The app allows any user to text an invitation to one or two other users to join in the video chat, where each user is given independent control over the volume balance between their comments and the game audio.
Along with support from Ease Live, the YES iteration of watch parties utilizes technology supplied by U.K. start-up Sceenic, which helps to bring the video chat element of shared viewing directly into the app as a tightly synchronized first-screen experience rather than running as a second-screen complement to the primary game feed. Synchronized reception of notoriously out-of-synch live unicast streams is an innovation that obviates reliance on alternative video conferencing infrastructures like those supported by the WebRTC protocol.
“No matter what platform, Android, iOS, or web, you’re on, we synchronize the video reception so there are no spoilers from other participants,” Duarte says. Synchronized stream reception also plays a role in other interactive aspects of the YES App, he adds.
One is a well-received feature known as “Pick-N-Play Live.” Introduced in 2022 with some refinements since, Pick-N-Play Live allows users to score points posted on app leaderboards in competition for points redeemable for YES gift cards related to things like predicting individual player and team performances during the game.
Revisions in this and other aspects of the YES App have aimed for what Duarte characterizes as a “more fan friendly” experience. One key change has to do with rewards for referring others to the platform, which is now available as a paid D2C option separate from a pay TV subscription to YES. Other additions to the app include a Spanish language version and an expansion of the app’s availability through OEMs’ smart TV platforms.
All of this, along with on-screen access to a rich mix of individual, team and league stats matched to user profiles, has paid off for YES, Duarte notes. Following the 2022 baseball season, YES reported the app’s second year led to a 39% increase in average unique viewers and a 33% increase in total streaming hours. Viewership grew in ’23 as well, Duarte says, and, during this year’s spring training “we’re seeing a 50% jump on the app,” much of it attributable to the enhanced rewards system.
Multiple Approaches Take Hold
Meanwhile, the most pervasive availability of new enhancements to baseball streaming is coming by way of Major League Baseball’s home-grown MLB.TV platform, which supports a subscription service streaming all major league games. This year, along with continuing support for live-game DVR, clickable in-game line scores, and league-wide scoreboard updates, MLB.TV expanded to four camera angle viewing options on its Multiview app. The service also added Catchup Mode, which allows viewers to get up to speed on games in progress.
The NBA is another league that has put together an internal development team to drive higher levels of fan engagement. The league now offers League Pass subscribers support for synchronized watch parties and a wide range of ancillary features, many personalized to deliver clips and data tied to each viewer’s interests.
Among suppliers of turnkey support for feature enhancements, New Jersey-based Kiswe has made significant progress bringing such capabilities to the world market through its Studio unit, formerly labeled CloudCast. Kiswe Studio has been engaged to enable the PGA, Spain’s World TeamTennis, Japan’s Sports Branding Japan Co., and other entities to imbue their services with remote commentary and a broad range of personalized graphics, video clips, and other interactive content delivered in synchronized real time to large audiences at global scales.
Kiswe also provides a turnkey full streaming service now serving several sports enterprises, including the New Orleans Pelicans, Phoenix Suns, Utah Jazz, Detroit Lions and multiple second- and third-tier teams. Along with global distribution, the options available on the Kiswe streaming platform include support for polling, multiple camera views, chat and fan selfie videos, ticketing and in-event merchandise sales integration.
This, in turn, is opening the door to new realms of monetization enabled by streamlined approaches to managing commercial transactions tied to these apps. We’ll be looking at that side of the app coin in a forthcoming article, but here we’re focusing on where this new era in user experience starts with technology that makes it possible to grab and use data at unprecedented scales in real-time synchronization with the core content flow.
“If you picture all the data that goes into a traditional broadcast today, we take that data into the cloud and make it available for the end users regardless of the device,” says Kjetil Horneland, CEO of Ease Live, the Norwegian company now owned by M&E production technology powerhouse Evertz. Utilizing the real-time aggregation and formatting capabilities of Ease Live’s technology, sports app developers “can go into an almost endless amount of data that we can surface to the end user,” Horneland says. “And then we can do polls and other interactive features “
These capabilities and the results they’re producing have vaunted Ease Live into the vanguard of suppliers to sports and other content producers looking for ways to expand user engagement. “We’ve done this for a number of different types of sports, both with leagues and regional sports networks – basketball, ice hockey, soccer, baseball, tennis,” Horneland says, adding, “but it’s not just in sports.”
A new strategy launched by NBC Universal with its TV broadcast stations in the U.S. illustrates what’s in store beyond the sports realm with capabilities like Ease Live’s. The initiative began this year with support for personalized broadcast experiences through NBCU’s NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) over-the-air channels on NBC- and Telemundo-owned stations in four markets. Along with enabling instant access to clips and alternative programming from the broadcasters’ news, sports and entertainment, the features include support for restarting programs when joined in progress; hyper-localized elements integrated into the TODAY show; and access to personalized weather information and severe weather alerts.
Users of the Ease Live technology are registering impressive results. Spain’s global soccer broadcast and streaming service LaLigua says its reliance on Ease Live to support interactivity allowing fans to engage in real time with instant highlights, live player and game stats, polls, quizzes, leaderboards and other features has led to a 25% increase in viewing time along with significant increases in advertising and sponsorships.
At IBC in Amsterdam, Austrian broadcaster Servus TV reported its use of Ease Live-supported overlays featuring stats, polls and other graphical elements with its streamed coverage of the UEFA Euro 2024 soccer tournament drew 62% of its viewers into interactive participation, topped by a 56% response rate to polls. At the same conference streaming technology company Bedrock, without offering specific stats, said its use of Ease Live technology to support enhanced UEFA Euro 2024 coverage by France’s M6+ had also led to a significant increase in fan engagement.
Stateside the biggest publicized splash involving Ease Live has been with the YES Network, which began using the vendor’s technology in 2021 to drive engagement with its coverage of New York area sports, including Yankees baseball, the NAB’s Brooklyn Nets, the WNBA’s New York Liberty, and Major League Soccer’s New York City FC. Now these capabilities have been extended through YES’s joint venture with regional sports rival MSG Network, Gotham Advanced Media & Entertainment (GAME), to MSG’s lineup, including the New York Mets, NAB’s New York Knicks, NHL’s New York Rangers, New York Islanders, New Jersey Devils and Buffalo Sabres, and, on occasion, the NFL’s New York Giants and Buffalo Bills.
While GAME has said little about its plans other than to note the recent launch of its Gotham Sports App as the catchall app for YES and MSG coverage, the partners have made clear their aim is to market their capabilities to outlets in other regions. “From design and content delivery across all platforms to ongoing management, technological and marketing services, Gotham Advanced Media and Entertainment is redefining the sports media ecosystem,” is how the only content on the GAME website articulates the agenda.
Right now Ease Live serves as Exhibit A in this surge toward next-gen user experiences, but the trend is pervasive, much of it building on home-grown as well as turnkey solutions where early successes have locked in producers’ commitments to these capabilities. These developments represent a big departure from efforts ten years ago that sought to achieve similar results by delivering personalized apps to second screens. Second-screen experiences remain part of the picture, but the game changer is movement of interactivity and personalization into the primary stream flow.
As described by Matt Duarte, vice president of strategy and business development at YES Network, the country’s leading regional sports outlet has been building on its use of Ease Live technology since 2021. The latest refinements YES introduced on its streaming app going into the 2024 baseball season were incremental but significant improvements that have been filtering into fan engagements with other affiliated teams as the year progresses.
One aspect to what YES did with Yankee streaming this year had to do with “revamping the look and feel” of the YES Watch Party feature,” Duarte says. The app allows any user to text an invitation to one or two other users to join in the video chat, where each user is given independent control over the volume balance between their comments and the game audio.
Along with support from Ease Live, the YES iteration of watch parties utilizes technology supplied by U.K. start-up Sceenic, which helps to bring the video chat element of shared viewing directly into the app as a tightly synchronized first-screen experience rather than running as a second-screen complement to the primary game feed. Synchronized reception of notoriously out-of-synch live unicast streams is an innovation that obviates reliance on alternative video conferencing infrastructures like those supported by the WebRTC protocol.
“No matter what platform, Android, iOS, or web, you’re on, we synchronize the video reception so there are no spoilers from other participants,” Duarte says. Synchronized stream reception also plays a role in other interactive aspects of the YES App, he adds.
One is a well-received feature known as “Pick-N-Play Live.” Introduced in 2022 with some refinements since, Pick-N-Play Live allows users to score points posted on app leaderboards in competition for points redeemable for YES gift cards related to things like predicting individual player and team performances during the game.
Revisions in this and other aspects of the YES App have aimed for what Duarte characterizes as a “more fan friendly” experience. One key change has to do with rewards for referring others to the platform, which is now available as a paid D2C option separate from a pay TV subscription to YES. Other additions to the app include a Spanish language version and an expansion of the app’s availability through OEMs’ smart TV platforms.
All of this, along with on-screen access to a rich mix of individual, team and league stats matched to user profiles, has paid off for YES, Duarte notes. Following the 2022 baseball season, YES reported the app’s second year led to a 39% increase in average unique viewers and a 33% increase in total streaming hours. Viewership grew in ’23 as well, Duarte says, and, during this year’s spring training “we’re seeing a 50% jump on the app,” much of it attributable to the enhanced rewards system.
Meanwhile, the most pervasive availability of new enhancements to baseball streaming is coming by way of Major League Baseball’s home-grown MLB.TV platform, which supports a subscription service streaming all major league games. This year, along with continuing support for live-game DVR, clickable in-game line scores, and league-wide scoreboard updates, MLB.TV expanded to four camera angle viewing options on its Multiview app. The service also added Catchup Mode, which allows viewers to get up to speed on games in progress.
The NBA is another league that has put together an internal development team to drive higher levels of fan engagement. The league now offers League Pass subscribers support for synchronized watch parties and a wide range of ancillary features, many personalized to deliver clips and data tied to each viewer’s interests.
Among suppliers of turnkey support for feature enhancements, New Jersey-based Kiswe has made significant progress bringing such capabilities to the world market through its Studio unit, formerly labeled CloudCast. Kiswe Studio has been engaged to enable the PGA, Spain’s World TeamTennis, Japan’s Sports Branding Japan Co., and other entities to imbue their services with remote commentary and a broad range of personalized graphics, video clips, and other interactive content delivered in synchronized real time to large audiences at global scales.
Kiswe also provides a turnkey full streaming service now serving several sports enterprises, including the New Orleans Pelicans, Phoenix Suns, Utah Jazz, Detroit Lions and multiple second- and third-tier teams. Along with global distribution, the options available on the Kiswe streaming platform include support for polling, multiple camera views, chat and fan selfie videos, ticketing and in-event merchandise sales integration.