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Real World and Game World Converge in Sports

See more videos like this on StreamingMedia.com.

Learn more about sports streaming at Streaming Media East Connect 2021.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Darcy Lorincz: Last year took probably five years of our future into six months. And we've been really playing on that blurred line and we have a crossover of gaming and sports. And of course we lean in heavily into sports-oriented games. We support Fortnite and Call of Duty and many of those other things, but what are the innovations going on? Well, first of all, you've got this crossover of different audience in different places, old people watching lean-back experiences in sports and, 18 to 35-year-olds playing interactive experiences and leaning forward heavily, and playing six different things at the same time. So all these gamified experiences now are kind of converging in this mushed up world between sports and esports.

Data visualization is big for us, automation of production workflows, making machines, do "people work." It's not new to us. I did that 20 years ago with broadcast automation, but now it's real. AI and machines are doing the work there and they understand what the numbers on a jersey are. They understand what a car looks like in a race. They understand what a goal is. These machines can render these experiences, and the data about those experiences in very interesting ways like they are in games. And so I think just the pure convergence of data and the visualization of data and the video, whether it's a game or whether it's a real sport, is very interesting. You saw lots of these examples during last year, and they've started to ramp up very heavily.

The Super Bowl was very heavily oriented towards those kinds of experiences. You can watch NFL games on Nickelodeon, which don't even look like a game in some cases. So I think that this convergence of game experiences and real experiences in sports is really where the interesting blurred lines are. And that's where we play heavily, where we're trying to figure out everything that machines could do that humans used to do, because the scale is huge. In the company I'm in now, we did 19 million events in five years. Imagine doing that many live sports events. In the sports days, the best year was 28,000 events. That was a lot, and it took a lot of people. We did 19 million with a little under a hundred people. I think the innovations in gaming and sports facilitating that convergence make it a really interesting place to be.

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