How to Monetize Interactive Live Sports Streaming with Real-Time SSAI
Interactive streaming has become an expectation, driven by platforms like TikTok and Amazon that blend real-time interaction with seamless e-commerce. For broadcasters and content creators, the challenge lies in meeting this demand for interactivity while maintaining the reliability and scale of traditional live streaming.
This is where Play Anywhere and Phenix collaborate, merging interactivity and low-latency delivery. Play Anywhere enables leagues, broadcasters, and content creators to unlock new revenue streams through interactive rights, allowing fans to bet, shop, and engage in real time with personalized experiences that advertisers value. Phenix ensures these interactions are delivered with sub-second latency and inter-device synchronization, while also supporting monetization through server-side ad insertion. Together, they offer a comprehensive solution for delivering engaging, low-latency experiences across live sports and other events.
We interviewed Play Anywhere CSO Pete Scott and Phenix CTO Bill Wishon about their technology partnership and its implications for the industry. We’ve integrated their thoughts, with light summarization and editing, into this story.
Play Anywhere: Delivering Interactivity at Scale
When Pete Scott, founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Play Anywhere, worked at WarnerMedia and Turner Sports, he saw a unique opportunity in traditional media contracts. “We would sit down with our great league partners and discuss what you can and cannot do in those broadcast contracts,” Scott explains. “There was always a gray area around what you could put on top of the content and what you couldn’t. So, I took advantage of that ambiguity and asked, can we figure out how we can establish interactive media rights and really trade on that?”
Scott recognized the timing was ideal for this innovation. “The consumer now has an expectation through TikTok and TikTok Shop to see video and to integrate with it. You’re seeing a massive use of QR codes to inject e-commerce into all kinds of videos,” he notes. “So, I think it’s time where the mind and the muscle in the living room have changed, and people have an expectation to interact with content or to get more information.”
This vision led to the creation of the Play Anywhere platform, which Scott describes as enabling “both the IP creator, like a league or an unscripted producer, or the social economy, and even the AI video creation platforms, to create interactivity inside videos that get created.”
He emphasizes the monetization potential of this interactivity, explaining that it can be leveraged “through e-commerce, personalized ads, wagering—a number of things. We facilitated that with the Play Anywhere platform to see that one plus one could really equal three for the folks that are part of that ecosystem that own the screen.”
A significant showcase of Play Anywhere’s capabilities came during the Olympics. Scott explains how Play Anywhere collaborated with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its broadcasters. “The IOC and the Olympic committee have a host of broadcasters. One of those is Dentsu in Asia, where Dentsu buys the rights and then sells the rights to over 22 different parties in Asia. And they presented our solution to the IOC and said, ‘We have broadcasters that would be interested in interacting with content, schedule, medal counts, the ability to purchase uniforms from the teams.’”
This partnership required rigorous compliance with IOC guidelines. “We created about a 100-page guideline of when you can and cannot put interactivity over live video,” Scott notes. “We rolled it out with MediaCorp on their OTT platform in Singapore, and we integrated our SDK to create these overlays. The buttons would appear on the right-hand side. Fans could go in and click on those buttons.”
Meanwhile, in Mexico, Claro Sports opted for a different approach. “Their stage was… positioned in front of the Eiffel Tower. They would call out a QR code that would go to a second screen experience that we hosted in Spanish,” Scott said. The companion product, developed in collaboration with Play Anywhere, and available to viewers in Mexico and 18 Latin American countries, included trivia, event results, schedules, medal counts, and e-commerce opportunities, offering fans a more immersive and personalized way to engage with the Games.
The Claro second screen experience at the 2024 Olympics
Scott highlights the effectiveness of these experiences, noting, “The percentages were pretty remarkable. Anywhere between 30 and 40 percent of the audience seeing those buttons were interacting. [So were] 30 to 40 percent of the audience that was seeing the QR code.”
The platform also enables real-time personalization. “We know when a goal is scored,” Scott says. “So, you can offer a jersey or another product very quickly. We’re integrated with Fanatics. We’re integrated with Amazon.” He emphasizes that such capabilities allow Play Anywhere to cater to a wide range of industries, from sports to unscripted TV and even AI-generated content. “We really believe we can take [existing content] off the shelf and re-interactivize it,” Scott explains. “When Anthony Bourdain comes to a restaurant, you get a link for booking that restaurant or booking the hotel or the Airbnb.”
Despite these successes, there’s one challenge that Play Anywhere faces: delivering these interactive experiences with low latency. Traditionally, Play Anywhere relies on broadcasters’ networks for video delivery, which often operate with latency levels far above what’s needed for seamless interactivity. Scott believes that the demand for interactivity is here, but the infrastructure needed to support it, particularly low-latency streaming, requires further innovation. This is where Phenix enters the picture.
Enter Phenix
“Here at Phenix, we’ve built a global network for creating interactive video experiences around the globe,” explains Bill Wishon, Chief Product Officer at Phenix. “This means end-to-end delivery in the sub half-second realm where you can have audience members talking to people in the stadium or on the field.”
Wishon emphasizes the importance of synchronization: “That synchronization of the video means that when I say, ‘Hey, that was a great goal,’ you’re seeing the same thing that I am at the same time versus a lot of the technologies today… it won't happen for them up until maybe 40, 50 seconds later.”
Phenix operates using WebRTC, an open protocol, but with customizations that set it apart. “We didn’t start off building it for chat experiences or any other kind of experience. We built it for this sort of broadcast interactive use case,” Wishon says. “We’ve built all the core componentry from when we acquire the signal through every step that is on that critical path, that critical latency path, globally ourselves.”
Discussing the challenges of scalability with WebRTC, Wishon says, “You do need a different infrastructure for it, so it isn’t something that just plugs into existing CDNs. We had to build a custom CDN essentially to support this.”
Wishon recalls his tenure “in the CTO’s office” at Akamai before coming to Phenix. “I was there for a number of years and had sort of inside view as to how these things work at scale. And I came and saw what Phenix had built in this real-time space and recognized the parallels to how these things operate.”
Phenix also integrates advanced features like adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) and server-side ad insertion (SSAI). “We can do personalized real-time ad insertion that doesn’t impact the end-to-end latency,” Wishon explained. “We integrate with standard advertising (VAST) endpoints. We take SCTE markers in, have a rules engine that calls out to different VAST tags, and gets standard responses. We then take those responses, do a just-in-time transcode, and insert the ad seamlessly into the video stream.”
Wishon explaining Phenix’s SSAI at IBC 2023
What makes this workflow exceptional is its speed. “We stitch the ad into the video content on the server side and send it down to the client so that there’s no gap, no transition on the client’s part,” Wishon says. “One frame is the last frame of the content, the next frame is the first frame of the ad, and then it seamlessly transitions back to the content at the end of the ad.”
Phenix’s scalability is also critical to its applicability to live sports streaming. The platform’s largest event to date, the Cheltenham 2024 horse race in the UK, handled 500,000 concurrent viewers watching a single stream with sub-second latency. “We regularly test each one of our points of presence to a million concurrents just to make sure that we have tested that headroom,” Wishon explains. “And then we also have tens of thousands of channels, that breadth of scale as well, every day.”
Phenix’s Cheltenham 2024 ULL large-scale live stream
Regarding synchronization, Wishon says, “We have some intellectual property around that, and we focus on that as one of our key performance indicators. Everybody is getting the stream at the same time within a very small synchronization window of a few frames of video.”
Reflecting on the reasons major sports events like the Super Bowl haven’t yet adopted Phenix or other ultra-low latency solutions, Wishon explains, “Clearly one part of it was the lack of server-side ad insertion and digital rights management. That’s something that is relatively new for us and for the industry around real time. Without ad monetization, there was no realistic expectation that that content could come through a real-time network.”
Wishon also notes shifting consumer expectations around latency: “People are not happy when they learn about the goal before they see the action on the screen. The industry is trying to pull latencies down to broadcast levels. Once you get there, there’s still going to be enough pull or drive for at least a portion of the audience to be driven towards that real-time experience.”
The Power of Partnership
Play Anywhere and Phenix have partnered to deliver a joint solution that combines real-time server-side ad insertion (SSAI) with interactive experiences like gamification, e-commerce, betting, and interactive ads. “We saw a gap in the market for creating interactive rights,” Scott says. “I think there’s money on the table. If you can provide low-latency synced data experiences, people will pay for it.”
“We’re the video platform,” says Wishon. “Our scope of operation is to make sure that the video, audio, and any ancillary data are ingested, processed, and delivered globally with that guarantee of the end-to-end latency and the synchronization.”
Reflecting upon the value of the joint offering, Wishon also notes the simplicity of integrating their platform with Play Anywhere’s. “It’s an ease of adoption,” he explained. “We have all of the pieces worked out—business and technology—before a conversation happens, so that as we engage, we’ve got a very smooth path towards realization of that experience.” This division of roles allows broadcasters to easily adopt the solution, with Phenix handling the video and latency while Play Anywhere drives interactivity.
Scott reflects on the broader impact of the partnership, stating, “It’s about creating a value chain where everyone—leagues, broadcasters, and viewers—benefits.”
Challenges Ahead
Despite the solution’s promise, challenges remain. Scott compares the adoption of low-latency interactivity to the early days of HD broadcasting: “If you remember, HD started off as a separate channel,” Scott says. “People didn’t believe there was enough audience demand to justify the cost. But eventually, the consumer expectation shifted, and HD became the standard. I see the same trajectory for low latency and interactivity.”
Scott also discusses expanding interactivity beyond sports, citing examples like unscripted TV and AI-generated content. “We’ve had good discussions about integrating interactivity into unscripted TV, like Big Brother,” Scott says. “Maybe you get an IKEA product placement, and during the show, viewers can buy the pillowcase or the blanket that’s on the bed.”
Wishon adds that interactivity is influencing broader streaming decisions: “Even in traditional broadcast workflows, the demand for interactivity is starting to influence decisions,” Wishon explains. “Gamification, social integration, and betting are all pulling latencies down. Eventually, we’ll see these experiences expand beyond sports to touch all aspects of entertainment and media.”
Conclusion
The collaboration between Play Anywhere and Phenix offers broadcasters a transformative opportunity to meet the modern viewer’s expectations for interactivity and low-latency streaming. By combining interactive rights monetization with sub-second video delivery, they create new opportunities for engagement and revenue.
“It’s a synchronicity of our engineering teams to create a compelling engagement for fans through interactivity and low latency,” Scott says. “Combined, it’s a unique and valuable experience for the consumer.”
The partnership signals a future where interactivity and real-time engagement redefine how content is created and consumed. As Scott notes, “We believe this is going to be the future of how people watch television.”
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