Out of Home, On the Money: Live Event Streaming is Winning Outside the Living Room
Streaming companies face intense competition over limited household wallet share, engagement time, and the costly live event rights that draw viewers to their platforms. Today, content owners and rights holders are looking for creative methods to engage audiences beyond the confines of direct-to-consumer and streaming platforms while slicing and dicing rights agreements in new, tailored ways. While a surge in service aggregation and bundling promises to simplify consumer experiences while boosting customer acquisition and retention for major service providers, people that I speak with are also thinking about complementary strategies to reach audiences in new viewing environments.
Immersive shared experiences that take audiences outside of their living rooms are growing in popularity — helping increase audience reach while opening up hyper-targeted, localized advertising opportunities. I work with digital platforms and rights holders eyeing up new environments across betting locations, movie theaters, fan zone venues, and more. Advances in multipoint live video distribution and low latency live event streaming make it more feasible for rights holders to bring high-value content to new frontiers.
Show me the ROI: Create once, use better
Increasingly fragmented, non-exclusive rights models mean that sports leagues and federations can monetize their content in infinite ways and engage with limitless rights holders. Meanwhile, major digital platforms are pushing to expand their reach and maximize ROI on significant rights investments. The core ability to produce one version of live event content and cost-efficiently proliferate multiple tailored versions of the same event for diverse takers is central to enhancing the value of content for all players — whether more easily creating regionalized feeds with local language commentary, advertising and graphics, or delivering complex format conversion and audio normalization for the biggest, most immersive cinema screens.
With automation-driven content enrichment capabilities embedded at the core of a live production and distribution workflow, rights holders can more effectively pursue a highly tailored, spiderweb approach to global live video distribution — without the heavy cost burdens traditionally associated with versioning, formatting, and regionalizing individual feeds for global takers. These methodologies extend to non-traditional viewing locations like movie theaters, simplifying the intricate content preparation requirements for showing live video on screens much larger and in higher quality than the production may have initially been intended for.
Unique in-theater experiences power new revenue streams
Take IMAX for example, who streamed major events like the Paris Summer Games opening ceremony, college football, and the NBA Finals to many sold-out theater audiences in the US and East Asia last year in immersive quality — alongside a massive range of live entertainment and music concerts. These shared live event streaming experiences can blend the magic of cinema trips with world-class picture quality, immersive audio, and the thrill of premier, unmissable sporting moments. They also open up new customer engagement and monetization avenues beyond traditional video subscriptions. With the right ad enablement and metadata parsing technologies in place, highly-defined, ticket-holding attendees watching the same live content in a specific location represent an exciting opportunity for advertisers looking to engage localized audiences with ultra-targeted experiences.
Delivering these types of in-theater events requires comprehensive and highly reliable live video distribution and delivery workflows. Opting for a managed global IP network that offers superior redundancy and lower latency than protocol-only SRT solutions is crucial — any quality issues in a live stream are exacerbated in a theater viewing scenario where every viewer relies on the same stream. Alongside preparing for complex audio normalization and format conversion requirements, connectivity is also a huge consideration for streaming providers and venues. In several IMAX locations, internet connectivity was limited to just 50 Mbps, requiring intelligent compression and optimization technologies to ensure unmatched viewing quality despite bandwidth constraints.
Winning sports betting with low latency live event streaming
Another interesting example is global sports streamer DAZN’s recent push to bring low latency live event streaming channels to over 1,000 betting shops across Germany, spinning up and managing unique versions of core linear channels to support busy game days with multiple concurrent matches. Harnessing software-driven channel creation and playout tools to scale a live event-based channel portfolio is an important way for rights holders to flexibly deliver a wider variety of event content, particularly during major sports tournaments. Using similar tools to create specialized, low-latency channels for third-party betting platforms offers new opportunities to reach highly-engaged wagering communities — outside of a streamers’ core subscriber base — with unique experiences.
Whether you’re looking to bring specialized low-latency live event streaming to betting shops, or introduce gamification and interactivity features to improve viewing experiences for core audiences, reducing latency across every step of the video chain is critical. When hundreds, or even thousands of people are gathered in movie theaters or fan zones for premier live sports experiences, streaming delays and asynchronous score alerts via mobile devices can be even more damaging to the collective experience. Beyond significant advances in last-mile delivery protocols, rights holders and distribution platforms can also reduce latency further up the video chain through more closely connected production and playout workflows to achieve measurable improvements without sacrificing reliability.
Navigate new frontiers with intelligent live video distribution
Rights holders need to be agile about finding new routes to audiences wherever they are — whether in movie theaters, hospitality venues, wagering locations, or elsewhere. Delivering complex and expansive projects that take premier event content to new frontiers requires efficient multichannel live video distribution technology that enables experimentation without restrictive costs. It means exploring location-based, targeted ad opportunities and prioritizing latency reduction at every step to ensure synchronized live experiences. It also comes with a range of challenging commercial rights models across venue types and blackout considerations that teams need to manage effectively. Big players are becoming more nimble and responsive than ever to engage audiences previously out of reach. It’s all to play for — and the playing field is getting wider every day.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from LTN. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
Related Articles
If 2024 was the year of live-streaming sports, Dave Dembowski of Operative writes that 2025 is the year of live-streaming ad innovation. With massive audiences that continue to steal from traditional TV, advertisers are looking for new opportunities to reach massive live audiences digitally. Media companies are working hard to offer the TV advertising experience of the future. That future will include new forms of targeting, interactivity, creative ad formats, and much more.
18 Feb 2025
This year's NewFronts signaled a paradigm shift in CTV advertising, focusing on interactive experiences. This holds particular promise for live sports, where viewer engagement is paramount. Gijsbert Pols, Ph.D., director of connected TV and new channels at Adjust, discusses the specific applications of hyper-contextualization in live sports advertising, and he explores potential challenges and solutions to jump into the exciting future of sports fan engagement within the ever-evolving CTV landscape.
03 Sep 2024
The summer of 2024 has presented sports programming that rivals any other year in history, including the Copa America finals, Tour de France, NBA finals, two golf majors, ICC World T20, Wimbledon, U.S. Open, an array of F1 Grand Prix's, or the recently finished Paris Olympics and Paralympics. Matt Shapiro, Senior Director of Business Development, Qwilt, discusses the challenges of maintaining a superior QoE across video-on-demand and OTT services and the new formats arising to meet them.
14 Aug 2024
Companies and Suppliers Mentioned