WHATS'ON

Live Sports Programming

Your game plan for a highly competitive market

The world of live sports is going through substantial and fast changes in rights management and monetization, technology, distribution, and business models. The systems used for engaging increasingly fragmented sports audiences will need to have the flexibility, openness and functional depth to cope with all that.

WHATS’ON offers what it takes to meet both the eternal and new challenges of live sports streaming and broadcasting, and come out winning thanks to engaged audiences, operational efficiency, and a sound return on your investment in live sports.

MEET THE ETERNAL CHALLENGES OF LIVE SPORTS

The high complexity of sports rights

  • Schedule your live sports events with the only sports-specific rights verification tool on the market.
  • Manage sports events in a structure.
  • Rely on highly automated scheduling workflows for live sports.
  • Rights are described with powerful tools for complex date formulas. No need to manually change dates whenever one date change has a knock-on effect on the rest of the competition or season.
  • Make faster and smarter decisions about your schedule thanks to real-time insight into content availability based on rights, obligations, restrictions, and use.

The inherent unpredictability (rainouts, delays, cancellations, extra time, ...)

  • You can prepare and update alternative schedules with your normal scheduling tools. For every event, you can define various scenarios and corresponding production needs.
  • You can easily adapt your short-term schedules, or switch to an alternative schedule, and steer Playout accordingly. For networks, triggers are sent from the central overview that adjust the various scenarios of the individual channels in a matter of seconds.
  • Last-minute changes are pushed to the EPGs thanks to tight integration with Playout.
  • WHATS’ON provides planners with a central view of all content related to a specific event. This makes it a lot easier to fill sudden gaps and find alternative content surrounding a sports event such as highlights, magazines, interviews, behind-the-scenes, and archive material.

STEP UP TO THE PLATE IN TODAY’S FRAGMENTED LIVE SPORTS MARKET

OTT delivery has drastically lowered the entry barrier to the live sports media industry. As a result, the market has fragmented, sports viewing expectations have changed, and the war for eyeballs has never been fiercer. As a result sports rights holders need to rise to new and considerable challenges.

With WHATS’ON you can cover all the bases.

1. Connect with the viewers on their terms

Competing players in the live sports field increasingly push content to a range of complementary platforms and channels. They shift the emphasis to OTT platforms and Direct-to-Consumer, and increase their presence and interactivity on social media. This implies constantly adapting and changing video formats to best suit the target audience.

How we make your life easier with WHATS’ON:

  • With automated reversioning and localization processes, content can be flexibly delivered in the right format to multiple platforms.
  • Content can be repurposed, sliced and diced, and recomposed thanks to a granular handle on rights. Whenever extracts are reused separately or as part of a new program, all applicable rights and restrictions are verified.
  • Content can be promoted on social networks and platforms with extracts, exclusive interviews, highlights, behind-the-scenes clips and other additional content.
  • You can quickly set up FAST services and pop-up channels.

2. Enhance the viewing experience to meet ever higher expectations

In a world where viewers can choose camera angles, watch games together remotely, enjoy virtual competitions, and interactive and gamified features, you need to provide your audience with a dynamic and targeted viewing experience.

How we make your life easier with WHATS’ON:

  • Reach target audiences with dedicated content on FAST channels and pop-up channels.
  • Live content can easily be combined with related content (sports magazines, documentaries, ..) to keep your viewers engaged.
  • You can easily launch and manage a mix of linear, on-demand, and combined services with the same single toolset.
  • EPGs are immediately updated after last-minute changes thanks to tight integration with playout.
  • WHATS’ON enables smart content promotion and curation.

3. Put data at the center of your media operations

You operate in a market where audience data (geographic, behavioral, transactional, needs-based, and psychographic) is increasingly analyzed and used for personalization and market segmentation. Infographics show real-time as well as historic statistics live on-screen, or on a complementary platform. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing are playing a growing part in content data enrichment and, eventually, in capturing the content intelligence. AI is increasingly integrated into content workflows, e.g. to automatically generate metadata from images, video and audio content, for search and discovery, subtitling and localization, compliance and brand safety, and content monetization.

How we make your life easier with WHATS’ON:

  • With WHATS’ON you can have a single source of truth for your entire media operation.
  • The use of available rights is optimized based on a central real-time view on rights assets.
  • WHATS’ON offers a rights-based suite of augmented intelligence solutions, including automated off-peak scheduling, rating predictions and scheduling recommendations.
  • You can manage event metadata in one central place. Thanks to the WHATS’ON Sports API you can import metadata from online sports databases that keep their information up to date. Changes and updates in these databases will ripple through to the transmissions.
  • To enable worldwide collaboration WHATS’ON offers web apps to remotely enrich the metadata depository (incl. press and publication details) from live venues.
  • Content created at live venues can be entered remotely into the system.
  • Scheduling of secondary events is completely automated (including text generation) and WHATS’ON tightly integrates with graphics systems.

With WHATS’ON the multifaceted complexity of rights, obligations and restrictions is captured right from the start by enabling diverse parties to capture data very early into the process and enrich it as the content proceeds through the supply chain. The diverse use cases are facilitated on a granular level through web workflows that are simplified for task-based contributions.

4. Reduce OPEX and increase ROI

In a world where operational efficiency is of the essence, there is a rapid shift to technologies that enable streamers and broadcasters to produce and deliver more content with fewer resources (e.g. remote production).

How we make your life easier with WHATS’ON:

  • With WHATS’ON you can improve operational efficiency by up to 80% thanks to:
    • Lean, software-drive workflows
    • unified linear and on-demand workflows
    • touchless operations
    • actionable content intelligence
    • seamless integration across existing systems
    • scalability that manages and supports growth
  • Localization processes that are highly automated and managed by exception can deliver a 75% decrease in late deliveries by localization vendors, thanks to the reduction in errors and duplication, increased monitoring elimination of emails and spreadsheets, real-time statuses, predictable forecasts… This also avoids rush charges.
  • WHATS’ON integrates with leading edge technology platforms that use dynamic resource assignment for remote live sports productions.
  • With WHATS’ON you can expand your channels, platforms and markets without operational constraints.
  • You can optimize commercial revenues through the seamless integration with the ATS or dynamic ad insertion system. Promos and sponsorships are automatically scheduled.

With WHATS’ON maximum return on investment is achieved through supply chain efficiency, a tighter grip on business models, and strategic windowing.

As media companies are moving to the Cloud driven by the need for agility, flexibility and elastic scalability, we offer a flexible, hybrid framework that supports the customer’s gradual adoption of cloud technologies and cloud deployment models.

Want to know more? Contact us.