The Cube is Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) state-of-the-art mixed-reality studio that was rebuilt, redesigned and revolutionised for Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, the tennis Grand Slams and for the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes – a new opportunity taken given it was the first time such a studio has been used for cycling.

Challenged with differentiating its Olympics coverage from 40 national broadcast partners, and to tell the stories from Beijing 2022 while operating under strict Covid-19 restrictions, WBD required a technical solution that maximised fan engagement and transported viewers to the event destinations.

To address this, the Cube was built from scratch with even greater ambition, integrating new software and motion graphics to push its technical, visual and analytical capacities – including the integration of Hawkeye data for tennis coverage – far beyond any traditional virtual set.

It engaged a record number of viewers for an Olympics 50+ markets in Europe as well as helped drive record streaming audiences for its coverage of the Australian Open, Roland-Garros, the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes across discovery+ Eurosport and GCN+.

Videocites is a technology company with unmatched video tracking and analytics services. The company developed a video analytics and protection platform that tracks any live and VOD content across social media, including all UGC/fan re-uploads (AKA Organic Boosts), and helps maximize the value of digital content.

Videocites is the Only company with the ability to track all Organic Boosts and translate them into increased revenue and actionable insights for better fan engagement and Effective Media Value.

Videocites MediaTrack is the first and only commercial product to reveal the complete video distribution and exposure of any event throughout the social platforms, and to substantially increase monetization for all the digital media value chain

VersusGame is a mobile game platform with millions of monthly players and growing. Pairing interactivity with culture, VersusGame empowers marketers and creators to generate interactive engagement and revenue through asking simple engaging video-based questions to a community who challenges each other in one versus one matchups to make the right prediction of a future event to win cash prizes.

The company asks to be considered for Innovation of the Year because our unique product has motivated Gen Zs to consume sports content in a form factor that is unique in gaming and stands to directly and favorably impact the ability for broadcasters to connect more consistently with a younger demo audience that has a short attention span and wants to feel more valued.

We believe that we can continue to satisfy the interests of GenZ consumers and the creator economy at whole while also inviting brands to tap into consumption patterns for their own benefit and we knew that the biggest challenge within traditional media was the fight for attention. Why did the winners in social media have to be at the expense of broadcast and digital media?

In the last 12 months the company made its service available to brands and media properties. including Billboard Magazine, UFC, ESPN, BuzzFeed, US News, Goal.com, Professional Fighters League and new properties are signing up weekly.

UFC would ask questions like HOW MANY TAKEDOWNS WILL NATE DIAZ ATTEMPT DURING HIS BOUT AT #UFC263 ON UFC PPV?

The Walking Dead tv show would ask questions like WILL NEGAN SHOW UP IN EPISODE 1113 ON AMC+

This gaming disruption will drive tune-in and revenue from the hard to reach Gen Z.

SuperSport Schools, is delighted to summit an entry into Innovation of the Year Award.

From extensive research, SuperSport understood that in Africa school sport is the foundation upon which sporting nations are built. As a result SuperSport Schools, a standalone subsidiary of SuperSport, launched a game changing youth sports broadcast network serving young athletes, families, coaches, schools and federations across South Africa.

Prior to 2020, South African school sport was live streamed on a small scale by multiple parties with mixed success. Content distributed across multiple platforms was undiscoverable, financially unsustainable with a large male sport bias. Tens of thousands of matches happening every week across the country, were inaccessible to the parents, grandparents, coaches, and players themselves. Commercial partnerships were sporadic and under-utilised.

SuperSport Schools has aggregated the sport people care about the most onto an easily discoverable and user friendly OTT App and social media ecosystem. Delivering live and VoD streams of school and youth sport using both traditional manned multi-camera crews and automated AI driven cameras.

Subscription is free to users and schools, with revenue derived from sponsorship and ad-supported streaming as well as early forays into ecommerce.

Having only launched in April 2021, the platform already has 183,283 subscribers and a total unique audience of 1,220,049. Over 15,840 hours of live school sport has been streamed, across 24 sports, 40% female matches, showcasing 6,500 teams from over 600 schools. It has fundamentally changed sport consumption in South Africa and are starting to roll-out the product in neighbouring countries. All with a sustainable AVOD driven commercial strategy.

The SPORT TV APP was created with the aim of revolutionising the digital presence of Portugal’s number 1 sports broadcaster. By creating a strong link between broadcast contents and digital world interactivity, this uniquely innovative case study has quickly become a national and international mark.

Major innovations:

– Dedicated Apps to each platform (iOS, Android, Huawei, tvOS, AndroidTV, Samsung, LG and web), focused on live channels and video-on-demand.

– Smart Info: a breakthrough feature available during live broadcasts, where segmented notifications and facial recognition technology augment the user experience, by issuing real-time statistics and unique personalised information of the athletes detected, using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence.

– Smart Call-to-Action: an algorithm that constantly evaluates real-time events to notify users to perform complementary actions when a specific event occurs. For instance, when a user receives a notification for watching a goal, he is redirected to another streaming channel (which is broadcasting with a 30-second delay) so he can watch the goal in real-time.

– Highly interactive features allow TV hosts to engage with the remote audience, by prompting spectators to send their opinions through text messages and participate in real-time polls.

– Real-time notifications – Match results of the main competitions and detailed statistic information.

– FORMULA 1 – Detailed information from the competition with major focus on gamification and engagement between users through Predictor F1.

An outstanding watching experience as well as better personalised content, led to higher rates of user attraction and retention. It has become one of the top 3 sports app in Portugal, both on Apple (4,6 rating) as well as Android (4,2 rating).

Major results:

– A growth of 11,200% in registered users.

– 14% of the Portuguese population.

– A growth of 85% in unique users.

– 40% of the Portuguese population use the app yearly.

– Gross revenue of +€1 million in advertisement. From scratch to 1 million.

Sky Sports is Sky’s leading sports broadcasting service, bringing customers some of the biggest and best global sporting events from the Premier League to Formula 1 and everything in-between.
Entered into the ‘Innovation Of The Year’ category, Sky Sports Boxing Vertical launched in the Sky Sports app for the Boxxer Series events in November 2021 and May 2022, which brought in more than 65,000 additional viewers to those watching 16:9 formats on traditional platforms. Average watch times for the streams across the two events were more than seven minutes per viewer, demonstrating a high level of engagement in the mobile-first format.
Sky Sports Boxing Vertical was conceived in line with our Boxing rebrand, and specifically to to appeal to a wider, younger and more tech-savvy audience, who are used to navigating the world though a mobile device. We wanted to bring added value to the mobile view, and saw this as an opportunity not to merely represent the coverage in a different aspect ratio, but use the aspect ratio of a vertical mobile frame to layer and enhance the coverage. We worked from the principle that mobile audiences would be well used to taking in significant amounts of information at once and leaned into this, displaying variously, and simultaneously, fight coverage, promo, stats, commentary and live shots. Added to the linear 16:9 coverage, we enhanced the vertical mobile feed with additional cameras, capturing an optimised vertical view of the fight, and live corner cameras, showing the reaction and emotion of the trainers at ringside, simultaneously along with the fight coverage. All of this was offered free to view on the Sky Sports App, giving anyone the option to watch Sky Sports Boxing in a brand new way.

Thanks to a pioneering agreement between MEDIAPRO, LaLiga and TikTok, the first football match in Spain and a major European league can be followed in vertical format on GOL’s profile on TikTok. A landmark broadcast for Spanish territory made possible thanks to the exclusive production in 9:16 format carried out by the MEDIAPRO Group in 4K quality and developed for ‘mobile first’. The broadcast included the adaptation of graphics and commentary from native TikTok content creators. A unique experience to impact new audiences and which has made an impact worldwide.

MEDIAPRO (leading audiovisual group) is submitting a candidature for the Innovation of the Year category following its continuous adaptation to new digital formats. The Group has taken a further step in its commitment to creating content to reach new audiences.

EE and BT Sport unveiled pioneering uses of 5G which re-imagine the experience of watching and performing sports, dance, music and theatre through virtual, augmented and mixed reality applications.

Using everyday devices such as smartphones, tablets and TVs, as well as the latest augmented reality (AR) headsets, the new prototypes enable users to take control and engage in an event from any angle of their choosing.

For example, rugby fans can take the experience of being at a match or event to previously unmatched levels with real-time, data-rich AR insights such as ball trajectories and kick distances. Boxing fans can bring fight nights into their own living room with highly immersive holographic videos which puts them up close to the boxers as they fight. Meanwhile, dancers, musicians and other artists can remotely demonstrate, teach and engage with students and fans using EE’s 5G network to provide real-time interactive experiences.

The prototypes were the first outputs from an EE and BT Sport-led project, 5G Edge-XR, which demonstrates how the potential of EE’s 5G network, paired with cloud graphics processing units, can enable consumers to view events in a range of new, highly immersive ways. 5G Edge-XR is supported by The Department of Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS), The Grid Factory, Condense Reality, DanceEast, Salsa Sound and The University of Bristol.

THE PLAYERS Championship needs little introduction to golf fans. It’s the PGA TOUR’s biggest annual tournament and features the biggest names in golf. For the 2022 tournament, as part of an ambitious innovative second-screen viewing experience, PGA TOUR wanted to add video highlights to its OTT platform TOURCast. These highlights would show each and every shot from every player, giving fans around the world the chance to watch ALL the action from the golfers they wanted to see.

The key challenge PGA TOUR faced was generating highlights at such a massive scale, with multiple shots happening simultaneously, and then incorporating the huge volume into TOURCast and syncing them so they appear alongside the right player and shot data, also available on TOURCast.

To deliver this innovative new fan experience PGA TOUR turned to long-time and trusted vendor WSC Sports, the global leader in AI sports video technology.

WSC Sports’ machine learning technology has been taught to recognize every golfer on the course and all actions of the sport. In real-time it tags, indexes and ranks every action taken and then automatically creates and distributes highlight videos.

WSC Sports automatically created highlights for a total of 25,454 shots, from 144 golfers, over the four days and made these videos available to fans on TOURCast within just 90 seconds of the action taking place on the course.

By leveraging WSC Sports’ technology PGA TOUR truly went above and beyond traditional tournament coverage. Giving fans the chance to navigate freely through highlights as they happen, of the players that matter most to them, setting a new standard for how golf fans worldwide will expect to consume the sport they love from now on.

The innovation displayed through this collaboration makes this entry a clear frontrunner for ‘Tech Solution of the Year’.

We enrich e-commerce connections and transform them to feel simple and personal anytime, anywhere.

At Vindicia, we take the work out of subscriptions, so our customers can delight their fans. We are fueled by nearly two decades of data and deep payment expertise that enable businesses to launch, scale, engage, and prevent churn.

Capturing reliable, recurring revenue is essential, but at Vindicia we know your fanbase aren’t rows on a balance sheet; acquisition is not the end game. Real life sports fans expect seamless, fresh, and unexpected experiences.

Vindicia removes the friction of management to empower sports subscription businesses to connect, innovate, and monetize as they build long-lasting relationships.

Getting new subscribers is hard. Losing them is easy. Retention is a complex business with ever-changing inputs that are more than many customers can handle. But to optimize revenue in today’s saturated subscription market it’s, critical that brands attack churn head on. Luckily, Vindicia Retain is locked and loaded, ready to tackle the beast of churn.

Powered by two decades of deep, cross-industry experience, Vindicia Retain leverages the most comprehensive experience and intelligence in the business, and focuses it on one thing – eliminating churn. An agile suite of integrated tools and solutions, Vindicia Retain effortlessly delivers precise insights and actions to ensure customers are always ready for whatever the market brings next. It’s a shockingly easy way to improve retention, optimize payments and experience, and unlock new levels of revenue and loyalty.

Today’s lack of transparency between broadcasters and publishers is damaging both sides, but mostly publishers. With no monitoring tools, publishers had no way of evaluating their broadcasters and their content production efficiency. That is all changed now with Videocites new Broadcaster Social Monitoring service. Better productions, better conversion, and better evaluation is now made possible, breaking the invisible barrier publishers had with how their content is performing and how to optimize expenses and monetization.

Spiideo’s automated sports video solutions are trusted by media rights-holders, leagues, federations, clubs and schools – all around the world. Spiideo’s fixed and mobile camera systems for both indoor and outdoor sports, feature automatic recording, AutoFollow, and virtual panorama technology that integrates directly with both Spiideo Perform (Analysis) and Spiideo Play (automatic production).

As a candidate for Tech Solution of the Year, Spiideo represents the changing shift in the media and OTT industries. Professional broadcasts have typically been reserved for the elite leagues and teams. But as technology unlocks this for other levels in the pyramid, Spiideo offers an OTT platform and integrations with existing streaming services for the best user-experience. From the same camera systems, rights-holders, leagues, and teams can also offer Spiideo Perform analysis tools for player and team development – improving the product on the field.

Spiideo’s technology is transforming the ROI that rights-holders require for creating the best experiences. By being cloud-based, Spiideo empowers these organizations to schedule and maintain thousands of broadcasts simultaneously. By installing Spiideo automated camera systems and using unique tools such as AutoFollow, CloudStudio Anywhere™, CloudControl, video overlays, and mobile streaming; they are covering events that otherwise wouldn’t be available for consumption.

As the leader in automated broadcasting and analysis, Spiideo’s solution is being used by organizations – such as the Gothia Cup, Dana Cup, Ringier Sports, and MLS NEXT PRO – to scale broadcasting to fans, parents, and friends across the globe. In a single week, for example, Gothia Cup was able to broadcast 2,000+ matches to 177,000 viewers by deploying 43 automated Spiideo camera systems across Gothenburg, Sweden.

This is how DFL made Bundesliga 2 (2nd division of professional football in Germany) available to international OTT audiences with the help of a cost-effective remote production in the AWS cloud. As a result, international broadcasts almost doubled (+98%) and international reach almost quadrupled (+189%) compared to the previous season. For Bundesliga season 2021/22, DFL started to offer all 306 Bundesliga 2 (2nd division) matches plus the relegation play-offs as ready-to-air live streams worldwide. The workflow behind this service is likewise entirely new: DFL’s host broadcaster Sportcast streams the Bundesliga 2 basic signal into the AWS cloud, where match data collected by DFL subsidiary Sportec Solutions AG are added as graphics automatically. While in the past media partners had to invest significant effort to create team lineups, player names or graphics of match stats to add to the transmitted signal, these production processes can now be automated and performed centrally in real time by DFL. This is accomplished by using comprehensive match event and tracking information which is collected in Bundesliga 2 as in Bundesliga matches, and with the support of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the provider of the world’s most extensive and popular cloud platform. English live commentary is added to 2 matches per round with the help of a cloud-based remote commentary solution provided by TVU which helps to synchronize video and audio and add the English voices of Bundesliga 2 commentators to the live stream.

As TV distribution continues to be transformed by the Internet, TV advertising no longer meets the needs of consumers, advertisers or broadcasters. Consumers want advertising which is personalized and relevant to them; advertisers want to apply digital targeting and measurement and the ability to reach younger and specific audiences, while broadcasters need a unified platform to trade all of their advertising inventory in a scalable and automated way. All of this has to work with the viewer being at the centre of an immersive, non-intrusive experience across multiple screens and devices.

Sports OTT leader DAZN have, in partnership with Google, is building a fully “addressable and programmatic TV sales house of the future”, solving all of these industry problems, while delivering a seamless experience for their viewers.

DAZN’s solution relies on 3 components:

1) Dynamic Ad Insertion from Google supports seamless insertion of advertising at live TV scale – with millions of ad impressions stitched for multiple DAZN sports matches globally every week. Using the Early Ad Break Notifications system, DAZN is able to distribute the load and ensure that all ad breaks are filled as planned with commercial and non-commercial elements

2) Google Ad Manager enables the live ad breaks to be curated, using the Ad Break Templates feature to support compliance bumpers and other logic to fill ad slots in the most optimal way

3)ADZN – DAZN’s proprietary ad inventory platform allows for forecasting and order management of all addressable and non-addressable advertising inventory for a unified sales, operations and reporting process

Buzzer is a mobile-first platform delivering short-form access to the best moments in live sports, making it easier for fans to consume live sports.

Buzzer has advanced the sports media industry by improving access to live sports and where and how next-generation fans are watching. Our technology aligns with evolving consumption habits of Gen Z and mobile-first sports fans with hyper-personalized notifications, short-form live formats, and multi-sport strategy, driving fans back to the live window. Simultaneously, Buzzer is helping rights holders engage with new and younger audiences that are mobile-first. Buzzer has modeled its business to be partner-centric and complementary, helping to improve discoverability of content to drive cross-sport engagement, develop net new audiences and increase revenue for its partners.

Buzzer continues to improve the fan experience by leveraging data to serve as the last mile tech connecting fans to ephemeral live sports moments. Through its unique and innovative product and by partnering with the top leagues in professional sports, Buzzer identifies ‘lightning in a bottle’ moments in live sports so fans never have to miss the moments that matter most to them.

TennisONE is the first media group in history to showcase the entire NCAA Division I Tennis Championships—live streaming the first ball to the last—including the team, individual, and doubles finals, all on ONE platform, and at no cost to fans. This required extensive coordination with 27 different host sites, and only three days to prepare between the selection show and the first-round matches. TennisONE ingested 184 different camera feeds from multiple streaming and scoring platforms, to showcase 128 college teams across the country. On a single day during the first round, TennisONE live streamed 134 different tennis matches, and ultimately broadcast an unprecedented 536,000 hours of live streams in total. Fans were able to enjoy the live tennis on multiple viewing devices including iOS, Android, iPad, Mac App, TennisONE.com, and Airplay screen mirror to tv.

Additionally, TennisONE featured exclusive CrowdLIVE events, where fans could interact face-to-face with commentators, coaches, and players, about the match action. TennisONE featured a weekly show leading up to the Championships, called the “Road to Champaign.” TennisONE also showcased the highly anticipated Stanford vs. Baylor matchup during the Super Regionals inside CrowdLIVE. Fans got to watch the match and interact with celebrity host commentators such as tennis legend Patrick McEnroe and Dick Gould, one of the most famous college coaches of all time.

At its annual meeting in June, the NCAA Division 1 Men’s and Women’s Tennis Committee “applauded TennisONE for providing exemplary championship coverage.”

TennisONE was proud to achieve unprecedented app store rankings during the NCAA D1 Tennis Championships, rising to #19 on the charts, higher than Fox Sports, and even the Official Roland-Garros App—during Roland Garros.

THE PLAYERS Championship needs little introduction to golf fans. It’s the PGA TOUR’s biggest annual tournament and features the biggest names in golf. For the 2022 tournament, as part of an ambitious innovative second-screen viewing experience, PGA TOUR wanted to add video highlights to its OTT platform TOURCast. These highlights would show each and every shot from every player, giving fans around the world the chance to watch ALL the action from the golfers they wanted to see.

The key challenge PGA TOUR faced was generating highlights at such a massive scale, with multiple shots happening simultaneously, and then incorporating the huge volume into TOURCast and syncing them so they appear alongside the right player and shot data, also available on TOURCast.
To deliver this innovative new fan experience PGA TOUR turned to long-time and trusted vendor WSC Sports, the global leader in AI sports video technology.

WSC Sports’ machine learning technology has been taught to recognize every golfer on the course and all actions of the sport. In real-time it tags, indexes and ranks every action taken and then automatically creates and distributes highlight videos.

WSC Sports automatically created highlights for a total of 25,454 shots, from 144 golfers, over the four days and made these videos available to fans on TOURCast within just 90 seconds of the action taking place on the course.

By leveraging WSC Sports’ technology PGA TOUR truly went above and beyond traditional tournament coverage. Giving fans the chance to navigate freely through highlights as they happen, of the players that matter most to them, setting a new standard for how golf fans worldwide will expect to consume the sport they love from now on.

The game changing experience for fans displayed through this collaboration makes this entry a clear frontrunner for ‘Best User Experience’.

The R&A group of companies was formed in 2004 to take on The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews’ responsibilities for governing the Rules of Golf, staging The Open, golf’s original championship, and developing the sport.

In 2022, The Open staged the 150th playing of the championship at the home of golf, St. Andrews. It was the 30th time that the historic Old Course hosted the world’s biggest and most popular golf event.

Unprecedented demand to attend this historic milestone for The Open led to more than 1.3 million applications in the ticket ballot and resulted in the highest-ever number of general admission tickets being issued to fans, with 290k spectators witnessing the action.

To celebrate this landmark staging of The Open, we were intent on providing an innovative and unrivalled experience for our fans across our digital
platforms.

Key to this enhanced user experience was the introduction of ‘ShotView’ – an enhanced data-driven platform where every shot from The Open was rendered on to a 3D digital twin of the Old Course, allowing fans to follow every shot from every player at The 150th Open in real time.

ShotView helped generate record digital engagement during Championship week, doubling a number of key metrics from the 2021 event, with significant impacts on both average session duration and pages per session.

The SPORT TV APP was created with the aim of revolutionising the digital presence of Portugal’s number 1 sports broadcaster. By creating a strong link between broadcast contents and digital world interactivity, this uniquely innovative case study has quickly become a national and international mark.

Major innovations:

– Dedicated Apps to each platform (iOS, Android, Huawei, tvOS, AndroidTV, Samsung, LG and web), focused on live channels and video-on-demand.

– Smart Info: a breakthrough feature available during live broadcasts, where segmented notifications and facial recognition technology augment the user experience, by issuing real-time statistics and unique personalised information of the athletes detected, using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence.

– Smart Call-to-Action: an algorithm that constantly evaluates real-time events to notify users to perform complementary actions when a specific event occurs. For instance, when a user receives a notification for watching a goal, he is redirected to another streaming channel (which is broadcasting with a 30-second delay) so he can watch the goal in real-time.

– Highly interactive features allow TV hosts to engage with the remote audience, by prompting spectators to send their opinions through text messages and participate in real-time polls.

– Real-time notifications – Match results of the main competitions and detailed statistic information.

– FORMULA 1 – Detailed information from the competition with major focus on gamification and engagement between users through Predictor F1.

An outstanding watching experience as well as better personalised content, led to higher rates of user attraction and retention. It has become one of the top 3 sports app in Portugal, both on Apple (4,6 rating) as well as Android (4,2 rating).

Major results:

– A growth of 11,200% in registered users.

– 14% of the Portuguese population.

– A growth of 85% in unique users.

– 40% of the Portuguese population use the app yearly.

– Gross revenue of +€1 million in advertisement. From scratch to 1 million.

Forza FC is a dynamic technology firm with strong roots in developing exceptional digital products, including the Forza Football live score app downloaded by more than 15M fans across the world and used daily by 1.5 million users. Our focus is working with leading clubs and organisations in the football industry to develop best in class OTT solutions that deliver next level experience to fans whilst enabling clubs to establish new revenue streams and to increase the quality of customer data they collect.

Our entry is for the Best User Experience. The focus of our entry is the OTT platform AIK+.A key motivation behind our entry is to recognise the incredible work done by members of our team working under exceptional circumstances. 80% of the team responsible are based in Ukraine. During the invasion of Ukraine they have built, released and continued to improve a new OTT app and website for AIK, the biggest team in Sweden. Upon release the app was the top grossing entertainment app in Sweden, has received a 4.9 rating on iOS and android from over 1500 reviews, and has created a significant new revenue source for the club generating an average revenue per user per month of over $2. This has been achieved while developers have been running to bomb shelters day and night. It has become a normality to pause meetings because of bomb alarms. The team’s commitment, drive and enthusiasm is incredibly inspiring.

The BT Sport cricket timeline on our app platforms is a new frontier for viewer interaction and experience within the live sports viewing world. Designed with extensive customer input and with a primary focus on ease of use, it has already helped transform customer expectations for how cricket, and test cricket in particular, can be consumed on app platforms. As customer expectations and technology continues to develop, the onus is on broadcasters to continue pushing the envelope on how sport can be consumed. We believe this timeline is a perfect example of combining modern device capabilities across both small and large screens, with real customer demands when watching live sport.

The YES Network, the most-watched regional sports network in the US, launched its self-built live-streaming mobile app, the YES App, in March 2021. The YES App provides subscribers with a live stream of the YES Network, which included New York Yankees, Brooklyn Nets, New York City FC, and New York Liberty games. The YES App has seen a year-over-year increase of unique-per-game viewership for Yankees games of 35% in 2022 and saw a 240% year over year increase in 2021 over its previous streaming partner.

The interactive graphic overlays built using Evertz Ease Live SaaS (software-as –a-service), takes the fan experience to another level by engaging fans with dynamic and personalized storytelling content on top of the live stream as a single-screen experience. Fans can access live game stats, polls, quizzes and facts without leaving the live video stream and app. The YES App additional features include: watch parties, where fans can invite their friends to a live video chat as they watch the game (fully synchronized for all participants); and its free-to-play, Pick-N-Play Live, that allows fans to make in-game predictions without leaving the live video stream.

Each new interactive overlay feature was methodically introduced across multiple Yankee and Nets seasons. The Yankee baseball season runs from March to October and the Nets season goes from November to April. This approach enabled YES and their creative teams to build unique experiences for different fan bases and sports while maintaining a stats, watch, and play philosophy.

The interactivity of the YES App, have helped bring larger audiences, where daily user registrations are up 45% year-over-year season to date; the total number hours viewed on the app is up 83%; unique viewers per game have climbed 33%; and the time spent per unique viewer has risen 10%. The increased engagements have provided YES Network with increased revenues with additional advertising units for each of the interactive overlay they add.

In today’s media ecosystem, Social Piracy is the most dominant type of piracy, accelerated by Covid and fueled mainly by the ease-of-access of the social platforms. It is rapidly growing at 40%+ Y/Y rate and creating a need for a next-generation type of technology that can manage the scale of the problem and the massive loss it is creating.

Videocites developed a proprietary video-AI fingerprinting technology that automatically tracks all copies of content multiplying across social networks, enabling Discover – a complete, automatic content protection and monetization service for VOD and Live content, which performs instantly at any scale and is immune to all manipulations.

Videocites Discover is proven to be the only technology with the scale, speed and accuracy required to detect all copies immediately and remove them before they create a real loss for the rights holders, pushing viewers towards conversion on legitimate platforms.

Illegal IPTV networks are a significant problem for the live sports video industry. Service providers and rights holders are losing up to $28.3 billion in revenue annually due to sports piracy.

Viaccess-Orca (VO), a global leader providing OTT and TV platforms, content protection, and advanced data solutions, is helping operators protect their premium content and revenues during live sports events with its Anti-Piracy Services. Anti-Piracy Services from VO offer a revolutionary new approach to fighting video piracy across all mediums, including on illegal IPTV networks. With Anti-Piracy Services, operators can identify the most impactful illegal IPTV networks during live sports events through 24/7 web crawling, identification of piracy sources, and real-time automated monitoring and ML-based data collection. What’s especially innovative about VO’s Anti-Piracy Services is its automated ML data collection capabilities, that help identify illegal IPTV services faster than ever.

VO’s Anti-Piracy Services are backed by a dedicated, global team of experts fluent in video security, investigation, ISO-certified security auditing, and legal prosecution.

VO’s Anti-Piracy Services have successfully been deployed by operators globally, including Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), the governing body that runs the major professional football leagues in France. By joining forces with VO, LFP has successfully identified, monitored, and taken countermeasures against the illegal redistribution of Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 matches. VO’s Anti-Piracy Services enabled LFP to achieve the first legal blocking order for an illegal IPTV service in France, representing a groundbreaking achievement for operators fighting piracy during live sports events.

LaLiga Content Protection, part of LaLiga Tech, has further established itself as a leading provider of antipiracy technologies for live and VOD content, passing milestones this year of 20 international clients, 70 partnerships with leading online companies and €9 billion in the value of media rights protected.

Its proprietary technology is a candidate for ‘Best in Anti-Piracy’ as it is the only platform that combines monitoring of all online platforms, analysis of threats and removal of content, all in one place. Through a new ‘one-to-one’ service model, each client receives a dedicated team of analysts who provide 24/7 monitoring and ongoing consultancy about new piracy trends, platforms and methods for improving the value of media rights. Alongside this, its international public affairs experts successfully drive new regulations that remove legal and technical barriers to removing and penalizing pirate activities.

On top of achieving major business growth this year, LaLiga Content Protection has also increased the success rate of its platform. Across its entire client base, thousands of illegal apps, streams or products have been detected and 98% of this content has been successfully removed.

To ensure it stays at the forefront of piracy threat detection, LaLiga Content Protection has also launched an intelligence unit this year to investigate new sources of piracy and acts of infiltration within groups or forums, collaborating with its cybersecurity department to detect any type of vulnerability that allows content to be stolen or broadcast without authorization. Since the launch of this unit, new technologies and sources of piracy have been detected and fought, as well as large security breaches of content from some of the largest sports competitions in the world.

The use of hijacked residential IP addresses is the latest way that pirate viewers are circumventing VPN blocking tools to watch lower-cost or free sports content in other countries. For example, viewers in the U.S. who want to subscribe to the NBA’s League Pass pay $199.99 each year, while in India it costs 1,500 rupees or $19.

To avoid paying full price for this content, users can subscribe to a VPN provider who will give them access using a local residential IP address that has been obtained through deception or stolen during a cyber attack.

The number of these pirate viewers is rising sharply and now starting to impact streaming providers’ bottom line.

In an industry first, GeoComply has enhanced its GeoGuard VPN blocking solution to differentiate between a real subscriber sitting at home, and an unwanted user free-riding from anywhere around the world on someone else’s IP.

By blocking these pirate viewers, GeoGuard reduces the burden on providers’ infrastructure and CDN capacity and ensures compliance with their contractual agreements with rights holders, such as sports leagues. Maintaining these territorial licensing models allows both rights holders and content owners to benefit from exclusivity in markets.

This is why GeoGuard deserves to be a winner in the best in anti-piracy category.

GeoComply is a global leader in geolocation security and fraud detection technology for the media and entertainment industry. Its VPN and proxy detection solution, GeoGuard, is used by streaming providers, broadcasters and sports leagues around the world to protect their territorially-restricted content from geo-piracy and location fraud. Customers include Amazon Prime Video, BBC, beIN Sports.

Friend MTS, an Emmy® award-winning company dedicated to content, platform and channel security, provides broadcasters, pay-TV operators and content owners with best-in-class content protection and anti-piracy services. Friend MTS’s 4th Generation ASiD is an enhanced and extended set of subscriber-level watermarking solutions. ASiD addresses a wide range of content protection scenarios to secure high-value content and revenue across all types of broadcast and OTT devices, clients and apps to protect Live streams and VOD assets. 4th Generation ASiD includes ASiD OTT Edge-switched, a highly-robust server-side A/B variant solution, alongside ASiD Client-composited, the most widely-deployed subscriber level watermarking solution globally, protecting millions of STBs and OTT devices. ASiD 4th generation allows rights holders, content creators, broadcasters, and platform operators to quickly and easily identify the source of online piracy, and to take immediate action to stop piracy at its origin, thus securing revenue, reducing subscriber churn and protecting valuable brand and corporate identity.

DAZN is the world’s leading sports entertainment platform and has reimagined the way people enjoy sport since launching in 2016. Live in 200+ markets, DAZN has partnered with the world’s leading organizations to deliver live sports and original content to fans in a way that matches today’s evolving viewing habits. In 2021, 27,000+ events and nearly 1 billion hours were streamed globally on DAZN by subscribers across 100+ million connected devices.

Along the way, through a comprehensive program and multi-supplier approach, DAZN is hyper-focused on an industry-leading and ever-evolving anti-piracy strategy, aggressively contributing towards one of the greatest challenges that costs rightsholders, broadcasters and other key stakeholders billions of dollars in revenue every year.

DAZN’s dedicated in-house team is constantly assessing trends around emerging platforms and industry-wide vulnerabilities, activating an always-on strategy that focuses on effective technologies, far-reaching operations, and exceptional partnerships that discourage casual fans from consuming pirated content.

For instance, VPN blocking implemented across DAZN’s platform and directly on DAZN’s CDNs resulted in the blocking of nearly 80,000 unique piracy attempts during their first-ever PPV fight. Meanwhile, DAZN’s strategic partnerships delivered an astounding 100% compliance on 1,000+ posts removed on Telegram, the manual removal of 8,000+ live videos for rightsholder partners on social media, and six successful investigations into major pirate operators. Details are highly confidential, but each are now offline, with enforcement coming through law enforcement referral and raids, external party knock and talks, amd domain seizures and shutdowns.

While combating piracy directly through endless measures, anti-piracy is also at the heart of DAZN’s future business vision. As it ascends towards becoming an immersive and interactive daily destination, DAZN’s evolution is evolving it into a must-have and can’t-pirate for sports fans all around the world.

Fan engagement is at the heart of how Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) delivers content, uncovering new ways to bring viewers the most complete experience possible that unlocks the power of sport.

Launched just 18 months prior to the Games, the Olympics on discovery+ delivered record digital fan engagement for millions of fans across key markets in Denmark, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the UK and Ireland.

Being differentiated within a household’s line up of OTT subscriptions, discovery+’s exclusive focus on non-fiction – including the world’s biggest library of real-life entertainment – offers sports-first audiences greater value. discovery+ opens up a whole new, broader and younger entertainment-first audience for sport and its stakeholders to engage them for even longer around the world’s biggest sporting events.
During Beijing 2022, WBD’s primary objective was to drive viewership and subscriptions to discovery+, its premium direct-to-consumer streaming product and establish it as the ‘Streaming Home of the Olympics’.
To achieve this, discovery+ delivered an unrivalled live content offer providing fans the opportunity to watch every unmissable moment from the Games, whenever, wherever, live and on-demand, unlocking the true power of the Olympic Games to engage fans.

Optus Sport is an Australian OTT platform with a dedicated focus on football, their passion and excitement for the game has seen Optus Sport become the benchmark for football fans in Australia.
Optus Sport entry into Best in Fan Engagement is simple, they are challenging the mindset of football fans by creating club based creative, competitions and content that include’s both the men’s and women’s teams under their OneLove strategy. As the rights holders of the FA Barclays Women’s Super League and the Premier League the Optus Sport team capitalised on the opportunity with 10 clubs playing across both leagues they have been able to change the role of gender across their platform, their marketing, their social channels and their user experience.

The YES Network, the most-watched regional sports network in the US, launched its self-built live-streaming mobile app, the YES App, in March 2021. The YES App provides subscribers with a live stream of the YES Network, which included New York Yankees, Brooklyn Nets, New York City FC, and New York Liberty games. The YES App has seen a year-over-year increase of unique-per-game viewership for Yankees games of 35% in 2022 and saw a 240% year over year increase in 2021 over its previous streaming partner.

The interactive graphic overlays built using Evertz Ease Live SaaS (software-as –a-service), takes the fan experience to another level by engaging fans with dynamic and personalized storytelling content on top of the live stream as a single-screen experience. Fans can access live game stats, polls, quizzes and facts without leaving the live video stream and app. The YES App additional features include: watch parties, where fans can invite their friends to a live video chat as they watch the game (fully synchronized for all participants); and its free-to-play, Pick-N-Play Live, that allows fans to make in-game predictions without leaving the live video stream.

Each new interactive overlay feature was methodically introduced across multiple Yankee and Nets seasons. The Yankee baseball season runs from March to October and the Nets season goes from November to April. This approach enabled YES and their creative teams to build unique experiences for different fan bases and sports while maintaining a stats, watch, and play philosophy.

The interactivity of the YES App, have helped bring larger audiences, where daily user registrations are up 45% year-over-year season to date; the total number hours viewed on the app is up 83%; unique viewers per game have climbed 33%; and the time spent per unique viewer has risen 10%. The increased engagements have provided YES Network with increased revenues with additional advertising units for each of the interactive overlay they add.

Kayo is the Australian fan-changing sports streaming service.

Kayo has entered the award for Fan Engagement after record results for F1 2022 season launch.

F1 is one of the hottest global sports right now and Australia is hosting its first GP in 2 years due to Covid.

Kayo centred our launch campaign around the fan – tapping into the emotion and drama of the sport. Kayo wanted to ensure that every fan knew that the only place to watch every race is on Kayo Sports.
Kayo targeted F1 Fanatics & ‘Drive to Survive’ bingers who are streamers and created a strong sense of FOMO amongst fans by not having Kayo.

From the Airport to the Track – Kayo took over Melbourne, intercepting a fan’s journey from the moment visitors landed to the commute to the track.

Media was strategically positioned at airports, billboards, interactive bus/tram shelter takeovers, train-station takeovers, tram wraps, light projections, street posters & radio blitz campaign. Interactive billboards encouraged people to take photos with their favourite drivers and post on social.

24hours out from the race, creative contextually targeted race-goers with a ‘At The Race? Watch Every Angle’ message to encourage fans to track the race on their device whilst soaking in the live experience – the ultimate fan companion.

Kayo launched an interactive fan poll on social asking fans what questions to ask drivers Verstappen & Perez and what Aussies dares to try including their best Aussie accent! The content went viral with 10M+ reach, international media coverage and F1 team reshares!

Kayo set a new record for F1 viewership on subscription TV in Australia and reached parity with Australia’s most watched sport AFL and drove 5x the amount of subscribers for average race driving strong revenue results.

COMPANY BIO: ELEVEN SPORTS is the world’s only dedicated platform offering premium to grassroots live sports content & original programming. In 2020, ELEVEN Belgium secured the domestic football rights to the Belgian Pro League for 5 seasons and committed to working with the league to create a new ‘Home of Belgian Football’ for fans throughout the country.

FAN ENGAGEMENT is the award category selected as its success is built on delivering unique digital content allowing fans to share and enjoy one of the things they most love -their club’s shirts!

SYNOPSIS: This was the first time that Belgian football fans were given the chance to access the full view of all 1800 shirts ever worn on a Belgian pitch in a digital form. The campaign also gave fans the opportunity to choose their own Ultimate Shirt.

With ELEVEN ULTIMATE SHIRT the Belgian Pro League and its clubs demonstrated a willingness to embrace an innovative and fan-centric digital campaign, showcasing their commitment to fans and the value they can bring to commercial partners. This campaign saw ELEVEN reach out to a total of 3.1M Belgian football fans with a message that celebrated the league’s legendary players.

DAZN is the world’s leading sports entertainment platform and has reimagined the way people enjoy sport since launching in 2016. Live in 200+ markets, DAZN has partnered with the world’s leading organizations to deliver live sports and original content to fans in a way that matches today’s evolving viewing habits.

When DAZN announced in June 2021 its global deal to broadcast the UEFA Women’s Champions League (UWCL), followed by its groundbreaking partnership with YouTube to make the competition free for the world to see, its intention was to give the women’s game unprecedented exposure and engage millions of fans the world over.

To start, DAZN unlocked free access to every single match for the very first time – a critical first step in engagement. It then elevated production quality – including lining up the biggest on-air team ever assembled to cover women’s football by a single broadcaster, with 50+ experts contributing to 168 broadcast feeds in 11 languages for the 61 matches to foster a more captivating fan viewing experience. An unrelenting stream of non-live programming was unleashed to keep fans on the pulse of the sport, including 700+ pieces of content and 14 new original series. DAZN country teams activated regional strategies to further drive local fan awareness and engagement.

And when the 2021-22 season concluded, a historic 64+ million views were clocked on DAZN and DAZN’s dedicated UWCL YouTube channel, with fans tuning in from 230+ countries and territories. The final match alone set a record for live viewership of 3.6 million globally.

No more what ifs – the demand for the women’s game is at an all-time high, its meteoric rise will only continue, and DAZN is proud to commit to fueling global fan engagement to even greater heights.

The TennisONE App is the ultimate solution to give global tennis fans everything they need in ONE platform to stay engaged with the sport year-round.

TennisONE is a comprehensive mobile app platform that engages fans through its live scores, stats, fan chat during live matches, player rankings, news, videos, social, live streams, and gamification. Additionally, TennisONE serves as the “Official App of more than 20 tournaments, including the Miami Open and Citi Open, offering premier partners monetization features such as ticketing, merchandise sales, and food and beverage order/delivery.

An exclusive CrowdLIVE feature for fan engagement has helped the TennisONE App become wildly successful in a short period of time. CrowdLIVE is a face-to-face live streaming platform that changes passive viewing to an interactive experience.

A key driver of fan engagement is TennisONE’s Game Zone and exclusive Bracket Battle, with the opportunity to make re-picks for wrong choices. Fans can buy re-picks or earn them by watching ads or answering sponsored survey questions. Thousands of participants play Bracket Battle each tournament to earn cash and prizes.

TennisONE is the first media group in history to showcase the entire NCAA Division I Tennis Championships—live streaming the first ball to the last—including the team, individual, and doubles finals, all on ONE platform, and at no cost to fans. This required extensive coordination with 27 different host sites, ultimately streaming an unprecedented 536,000 hours of live tennis.

At its annual meeting in June, the NCAA Division 1 Men’s and Women’s Tennis Committee “applauded TennisONE for providing exemplary championship coverage.” TennisONE was also proud to achieve unprecedented app store rankings during the NCAA D1 Tennis Championships, rising to #19 on the charts, higher than Fox Sports, and even the Official Roland-Garros App—during Roland Garros.

AC Milan is one of the most successful football clubs in the world identified for over a century with football, entertainment, passion and victories. Today AC Milan is a modern Entertainment Company capable of creating media events which involve millions of people worldwide.
AC Milan entered for the Best in Fan Engagement with the #AlwaysWithYou Campaign dedicated to the 2021/2022 Scudetto. #AlwaysWithYou is the best fitting campaign for the category because all the related activities carried on improved fan engagement, contributed to grow up club’s audience and boosted Commercial, Retail and e-Commerce revenues with a measurable proof of their impact.

#AlwaysWithYou is a fan engagement campaign putting fans at the centre. The goal was leverage on the 2021/22 Serie A Title to consolidate and increase the level of connection and engagement with fans, exploiting the emotional moment and driving club’s revenues.
#AlwaysWithYou accompanied fans through the most emotional celebrations’ moments through a video-centric and multichannel content strategy with a holistic commercial approach, combining both digital&offline touchpoints.

As a result, May 2022 was the seasonal peak in terms of engagements generated, registering an 85% increase over the second most engaging month of the season on September 2021.
#AlwaysWithYou enabled and boosted both awareness and engagement performances and retail & ecommerce results: 1,3K contents posted generating more than 750M impressions, 42M total engagement, 200M+ video views and 1,5M new followers in 7 days with a 3% growth rate (the highest one among the top European Clubs in their own post-victory week), resulting in an engagement rate of 5%, one percentage point above the 2021/2022 season average. May 2022 was the highest month of retail sales ever at the club. On May 23rd, we recorded 5 times more cumulative sales than our best day since ever, reaching 3€M+ retail sales through Milan Doors.

Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Race Previews is the annual social and digital output created by the team to describe the challenge of racing each individual grand prix race track. Traditionally it has been the driver describing the way the track handles and simply uses F1 cars driving on a test track as cutaways. For the 2021 season, Petronas were again keen to use their title Partnership of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team to create short ‘Race Preview’ content pieces to engage with their existing audience and attract new fans to their Petronas motorsports Channels. The brief was extremely clear – to shake up the standard F1 team preview content and bring something new and shareable to the table.

Our series of 23 films realised the brief in a fresh and abstract way, using allegory and metaphor and a unique insight from the two drivers Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas that isn’t typically covered in the media – a glimpse into their minds through an exciting, strikingly visual and ‘fresh for the genre’ creative treatment. With only two short four hour appearances with both drivers to shoot 23 films, we needed adaptability, collaboration and extensive pre-production planning. The production’s craft is on point with its editorial, visual effects, graphical treatment and sound design. The success of the campaign was extraordinary, achieving over 30 million organic views on digital and 1.2 million engagements. In comparison to the 2020 campaign of Race Reviews which totalled less than 100k views, we blew the numbers sky high, bringing massive ROI and visibility.

‘No Days Off ‘is Whistle’s flagship series that profiles up-and-coming young athletes and the support systems that help them achieve their goals. The series highlights diverse athletes whose drive and motivation have allowed them to overcome barriers to get to where they are today.

The franchise is focused on spotlighting positive and relatable sports talent that will resonate with our audience. Whistle fans want to see themselves represented in the series. As such, we celebrate a variety of young athletes, who are not only incredibly talented, but remain dedicated in their commitment despite the challenges they face throughout their journey. The shows are not only entertaining, but inspire fans to pursue their passions.

The appeal of ‘No Days Off’ is also rooted in its diversity. A wide range of sports are profiled, from more traditional sports like football, basketball, baseball and soccer, to non-traditional sports, including skateboarding, cheerleading and running. From a talent perspective, athletes portrayed range from amateuer to professional as well as from different cultures and gender expressions.

With a total of 250 shows, the franchise has racked up 4BN cross-platform views to date and 2.5M subscribers cross platforms.

Stars Inc.11 is a modern, multi-disciplinary, end to end & digital first media sports management agency. We elevate sports brands and athletes profiles through a 360 media solution.

We strongly believe that stories are meant to be told and each brand or personality has a story to tell. Hidden gems waiting for their chance to shine. We’re here to visualize it and create a tailor made profile with out of the box content creation.

Bordo Mavi documentary is one of these hidden gems. A sentimental yet humorous and fascinating story. An inside tale of Trabzonspor’s journey to win the title for the first time in 38 years.

Experience how the captain of Greek National Team leads a Turkish team to the top. Witness the cultural elements and how football affects the everyday life of a city that lives for its club.

Bordo Mavi is not an Amazon, Dazn or Netflix style of documentary. It’s real. It’s raw. It’s authentic. It’s a low budget personal project with high significance for Greece and Turkey. A documentary that is successful both in awareness, viewership and with revenues ten times bigger than the cost!!

A unique piece of original content. Exactly what this category is all about.

That’s why Bordo Mavi documentary deserves a position among the best original content.

Who doesn’t love an underdog story? A David Vs Goliath.

Stars Inc.11 and Bordo Mavi is a David…

FloSports is a subscription video streaming platform dedicated to sports, offering live and on-demand access to hundreds of thousands of competition events across 25+ vertical sport categories in the US and abroad. The company also produces original programs to complement our live streaming including films, documentaries, docu-series and now reality competition series.

FloSports’ mission is to provide under-appreciated sports the global platform and investment they deserve. One of those sports is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), a form of submission fighting popular among mixed martial arts (MMA) practitioners. FloSports investment into this sport is evidenced through its FloGrappling platform – widely considered the premiere destination for live BJJ competition, news, analysis and original programming.

We are submitting a nomination for the SportsPro OTT Awards Best Original Content category for ‘Who’s Next: Submission Fighter Challenge.’ ‘Who’s Next’ is a reality competition series that followed the journey of 16 elite submission fighters as they battled for a $10,000 cash prize and three-fight contract with FloSports’ Who’s Number One, submission fighting’s leading live competition event series. Tensions boiled, hijinks ensued, competitors bonded and personal histories were revealed as the eclectic cast of characters lived under the same roof, competed in a series of physical challenges, and fought until submission in each episode. The high stakes challenges and gut-busting house pranks stood in sharp contrast with heartbreaking stories of struggle and sacrifice shared by the cast throughout the series.The 6-episode series debuted on our FloGrappling platform and streamed weekly through May and June 2022, culminating in a live-streamed finale in mid-July. The series was embraced by the sport’s community and achieved our objectives including outperforming subscriber acquisition and social media engagement projections while also building new stars out of the cast/contestants.

From launch, FIFA+ has set out to be more than an OTT Platform, it aims to be the world-class digital destination for football fandom, a one-stop shop for fans across the globe to engage, enjoy, and interact with the beautiful game.

Aimed at bringing to life the best storytelling that the world of football has to offer, it homes an extensive archive of all men’s and women’s FIFA World Cup™ matches, interactive games and predictors, and is on course to stream 29,000 men’s matches and over 11,000 women’s matches by the end of 2022.

All of this is underpinned, however, by the platform’s slate of Originals, from long-form documentaries to snackable shorts, localised hubs in 11 languages, interactive games, and beyond.

The likes of Croatia: Defining a Nation and Ronaldinho: The Happiest Man on Earth are already garnering award and festival attention, while the platform is giving a voice to lesser told stories, including women’s teams in Brazil and India, U17 academies around the world, or the world’s only carbon-neutral professional side.

Through FIFA+, the football world is not only enjoying more Original content than ever before, but it’s learning about the global game and its progress, inclusion, and diversity at the same time.

Completely free, FIFA+ is available to download on both Android and iOS devices, with connected TV functionality arriving in the current months – all in 11 languages following the launch on WeChat in China.

Based in Glasgow and established by former pro mountain bike rider, Stu Thomson, Cut Media is rooted in sport, offering content strategy and end-to-end production for global brands and broadcasters including Adidas, Strava, Real Madrid, Red Bull and Discovery. Their work brings the audience closer to brands, and brands closer to the audience.

Cut Media’s use of cutting-edge technology paired with their expertise in putting the audience at the heart of the action makes World’s Best FPV Drone Shot? the perfect fit for the Best Original Content category.

Tasked with making the impossible possible, Red Bull Media House set Cut Media the challenge of capturing the high-speed action at urban downhill mountain bike race Red Bull Valparaiso in a single shot – something that had never been done before.

For this project, Cut Media wanted to deliver a world-first experience for the audience, bringing them as close as possible to the action and the athlete’s point of view. There was only one way to capture that fully – using a First Person View (FPV) drone. Much more agile than regular drones, FPVs provide a unique perspective on the pace of sports action, a far more intense experience than regular drones can achieve.

Red Bull exclusively released this video on their YouTube channel and instantly had a hit on their hands, with a 133% increase in average video view time (4m 39s v 2m channel average), as well as a staggering 32,140% increase in watch time (322,400 hours v 1000 channel average watch time), compared to existing content across their channel.

Cut Media’s inherent ability to immerse the audience in the action came to the forefront in this project to create a truly original video, delivering Red Bull one of their most successful pieces of content of 2022.

WWE was an early adapter to social media platforms and new technologies as ways to engage and connect with its fans around the world. As the global media landscape evolves, WWE continues to adapt to stay ahead of the curve in the digital world by creating engaging content specifically tailored for each of WWE’s global social media platforms. This unprecedented approach to content creation ensures WWE’s ability to feed the insatiable appetite of the WWE Universe.

Now a digital powerhouse, WWE currently boasts more than 1 billion social media followers and is the #2 most-followed sports brand in the world across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Further cementing its position as one of the most-followed and influential brands, WWE is also the #1 most-viewed sports channel on YouTube (ahead of the NBA, MLB, NFL, NHL, ESPN, NASCAR and FIFA) with more than 90 million subscribers and 70 billion lifetime video views, the seventh channel ever to reach this milestone.

Additionally, always looking at new emerging social media platforms and staying on the cutting edge of trends, in 2019, WWE launched its official TikTok channel. A massive success, today, WWE is now the #1 sports brand on TikTok ahead of the NBA, NFL, UFC, MLB and NHL.

Eurosport – Best Social Media Strategy

Eurosport, part of Warner Bros. Discovery, delivered the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 on 70 different social media accounts, in 21 languages, across six platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Snap.

A universal strategy was devised and presented to all social producers with the aim of achieving 420m video views, 16.2 million engagements and more than 2 million referrals to Eurosport.com.

A bespoke suite of Photoshop templates was designed by our creative team and distributed to all regions, while every market was provided with a social media playbook and training for Wildmoka, our new video production tool.

This ensured our branding on each channel was consistent and allowed everyone to live-clip video directly to social media in any of our 21 languages.

In addition to new Photoshop templates, we briefed a designer to create reactive, custom graphics throughout the games, providing us with stunning visuals to engage sports fans worldwide.

We also worked closely with our insights team and the social media companies to make our approach unique, data-driven and optimised for the varying audiences and user-behaviours on each platform.

The results were overwhelmingly positive. Beijing 2022 delivered 586m video views, over 30 million engagements and 6 million referrals to Eurosport.com.

As well as surpassing every pre-event target, we also outperformed almost every social media benchmark achieved during any sports event in the company’s history.

The FIH and NAGRA re-ignited the OTT strategy in 2022 under Watch.Hockey (the App and Website) as live competitions got back on the calendar. The campaign focus was on the Women’s World Cup tournament held on the 1st to 17th July in both Holland and the finals in Spain. A competition that had spectators and first since the pandemic. By implementing an ‘always on’ social media strategy to work alongside a creative content team on the ground at events, Watch.Hockey has produced groundbreaking content that has never been seen before in the sport. This statement is backed by the staggering number of engagements and views generated in a short space of time, across all the FIH channels and the incredible response from fans, players and coaches within the hockey community to the unique Watch.Hockey content created. Even the President of Chile was counted as one of the biggest fan engagements as he supported his team’s first win against Ireland.in the competition.

Optus Sport is a sports and content streaming platform. Available across iOS, Android, web & connected TV apps, as well as dedicated channels on Fetch TV, Optus Sport gives access to world class football and fitness content to all Australians.

We started with the question “how do we best involve young football fans to give them a platform and a voice where they can literally participate in the conversation with us in real-time, and what tools do we have at our disposal to do that?”

After careful consideration, we selected TikTok as the platform to produce Fan Roulette, where our hosts would let in guests who ‘request to join’ the conversation. We entertained more than 50 live guests across 16 one-hour episodes to let them have their say on the football topics that mattered to them. A light-touch approach with a high impact.

Optus Sport currently has almost 300k followers on TikTok and has generated more than 30-million views and more than 2-million engagements across the platform in the qualifying period of June 19, 2021 to July 29, 2022.
Based on the fast growth of our TikTok platform, we felt like this type of fan engagement project on social had the biggest opportunity here.

Kayo is the proudly Australian game-changing sports streaming service created to give you the ultimate way to get closer to the sports you love.

Since launching in 2019 Kayo Sports has quickly become Australia’s number one multi sports streaming service. We’ve been able to capture the attention of our Sports fans and to date have over 1.2 million subscribers.

However, we know that our next generation of sports fans are big on social, so we had to come up with tailored content that appeals to them and the best way to do that, bring in the athletes they love and admire to feature in our original content series to help launch the NRL Season.

To help launch the NRL season we produced a series of content that feature Australia’s best Rugby League players doing things that you wouldn’t expect them to do. By doing so, we entertained the sports fans across Australia, to help drive brand awareness of Kayo & position Kayo as the best place for them to watch their favourite teams play this season. Our NRL content to date, has surpassed over 4 million views with an average watch time of 70%. Proving that this content is not only a winner amongst NRL fans but sports fans more generally.

BT Sport’s Between The Lines, presented by Rio Ferdinand, was borne out of a desire to develop an in-depth analytical strand of engaging football content which could sit on both BT Sport’s and Rio’s social media channels and help to promote the channel’s linear TV rights offerings.

BT Sport’s Between The Lines is now established as excellent tactical football content strand with which to target 18-34 year-olds on YouTube – 75% of the views and 75% of the Watch Time came from this age demographic which was a key target from the outset.

World Padel Tour TV, the newly created official streaming platform of World Padel Tour, provides all the content of the best Padel in the world for free. Fans can enjoy more matches, more rounds, and exclusive content, both live and on-demand, anytime and anywhere through a best-in-class platform built around the World Padel Tour identity and experience.

The platform is a crucial element of World Padel Tour’s digital transformation. It is a vital pillar of the Tour’s global media strategy, complementing the offering of broadcasters showcasing the Tour around the world while supporting the expansion of the competition in countries where the sport is growing.

World Padel Tour TV is enabling World Padel Tour to know its fans better, allowing for an enhanced and more personalized user experience leading to increased fan value. It also allows connecting with the fan without intermediaries while having complete control of the product.

The launch of World Padel Tour TV has been an immense success, obtaining 88.400 pre-registered users before its launch date and becoming the #1 downloaded app in multiple markets. Only nine months after its launch, the platform already has more than 530.000 registered users, which have enjoyed ~4.5 million hours of content streamed across 190 countries. In less than a year, World Padel Tour has successfully migrated most of a fanbase built over the course of 9 years.

User satisfaction with the platform is notably high. World Padel Tour TV has 3.9 stars in the major App Stores, with 5-star reviews as the most frequent score given by users.

Courtside 1891 is a D2C venture between FIBA, the International Basketball Federation, and Two Circles, the sports marketing and data technology company. It launched on February 22nd this year.

Aggregating the best of basketball in one place, it features live and on-demand basketball streams, schedules and scores, bringing video and live data from professional men’s, women’s and youth basketball played across the globe into a single destination.

Key features include:

• Personalisation: Throughout their lifetime on Courtside 1891 users are pushed relevant and timely cross-channel notifications based on preferences and their behaviour, including in-game updates on live streams, and timely links to in-game highlights, results and game data
• Automated Highlights: Automatically-edited highlights are produced in four different lengths: three-minute, 10-minute, full-game replays and MVP highlights. No other sports service delivers highlights at such speed and variation
• Game Center: The world’s most comprehensive ‘home’ for basketball scores, schedules, highlights and game data for hundreds of basketball leagues and competitions. Based on behaviour and preferences, the Game Center adapts and understands what the user wants to see and needs to know.

As part of FIBA’s Roadmap for the Future of Basketball 2019-2027, it has a strategic objective to enlarge the FIBA family and drive sustainable media and marketing revenue growth. Critically this includes engaging the next generations of the basketball audience. Courtside 1891 is central to FIBA achieving this, and represents a unique approach by an international federation, and is an OTT product that delivers value for fans every day of the year.

TOD is a newly launched OTT platform for the MENA region. A part of the beIN Media Group, TOD offers its viewers exclusive access to unrivalled live sports content, and 30,000+ hours of premium entertainment content. A family-friendly and personalized platform, TOD offers 46 of beIN’s sports and entertainment channels, the best blockbusters and top Arabic, Turkish, and international content, as well as children’s programming. It also holds a range of new original content productions through “TOD Originals”.

Built around current customer needs, TOD incorporates latest technologies to provide an integrated and personalized experience that enhances live viewing, content navigation and accessibility. Given beIN SPORTS’ leading rights portfolio, it exclusively streams live and recorded sports like the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022TM, UEFA Champions League, English Premier League, LaLiga, Ligue 1, and every Grand Slam tennis tournament, NBA, among others.
TOD’s content comes in 4k/UHD quality including Dolby Atmos, presenting vivid visuals coupled with rich, clear, and powerful sounds. The platform comes with the ability to connect up to 5 devices including streaming of 2 at any one time on certain packages and supports popular smartphones and big screens, enabling one to enjoy content anytime anywhere. The platform is also available across web, Android, and iOS devices. Its interactive design for sports buffs comes with OPTA integration, with live stats updates during football matches. The OPTA data enables automated match highlights. If the viewers miss kick-off they can “watch from start”.
There’s a 120% business growth for TOD till July 31st vis a vis the first quarter since the platform launched in Jan 2022. The platform expects a higher engagement closer to FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022TM, as we ramp up our country specific awareness campaigns and strategic partnerships in the months to come.

Being the first sports OTT service to move entirely to the cloud was a bold move by Canada’s Sportsnet, but it paid off in a big way for the SN NOW service. Since launch in October 2021, SN NOW has racked up impressive numbers that make it an outstanding Best New Platform candidate:
–48% increase, unique views per month.
–71% increase, average minutes watched per stream.
— 23% increase, average monthly sales.

Deployed in less than six months by Quickplay, the platform combines flexibility, agility, and scalability of the cloud with performance and reliability of traditional broadcast TV. Three distinct cross-platform OTT services – Free, Standard, and Premium – run on a single backend to enable SN NOW to attract and engage casual viewers, fans with strong local interests, and hard-core sports audiences on all major consumer streaming platforms. The same backend enables TVE consumers to enjoy the service on any device of their choosing.

The Canadian streaming home of top tier events including the NHL, MLB, NBA, WWE, Bundesliga, the Grand Slam of Curling and IndyCar racing, SN NOW is showing how cloud-native architectures can achieve the performance required to satisfy the needs of extremely demanding sports viewers. The platform’s modular architecture slashes development time for new features to two weeks or less, making it feasible to experiment with novel ideas, beta test them quickly in-market, and tweak for availability to general audiences. It has achieved rigorous performance metrics, including:
o 99.99% reliability for upwards of 400 live events/month, plus secondary content;
o Support for 500,000 concurrent viewers across connected TVs, streaming boxes, tablets, mobile phones, and gaming consoles; and
o Rapid setup time of <15 minutes for event telecasts via One Touch deployment, relieving pressure on busy operations teams.

Fan reaction:“The real deal.” “Awesome!” “Canada’s number 1 for a reason 😊 ❤”

From launch, FIFA+ has set out to be more than an OTT Platform, it aims to be the world-class digital destination for football fandom, a one-stop shop for fans across the globe to engage, enjoy, and interact with the beautiful game.

Completely free, FIFA+ is available to download on both Android and iOS devices, with connected TV functionality arriving in the current months – all in 11 languages following the launch on WeChat in China.

Aimed at bringing to life the best storytelling that the world of football has to offer, it homes the world’s most extensive archive of all men’s and women’s FIFA World Cup™ matches, interactive games and predictors, a slate of original documentaries, docuseries, talk shows, and shorts and is on course to stream 29,000 men’s matches and over 11,000 women’s matches by the end of 2022.

Its Originals series are already gaining award and festival attention, and the sheer size of its catalogue of content – both archive and live – makes it unique among any rightsholder in sport. Already, important stories from Croatia, India, and grassroots clubs are being told on a global scale.

FIFA+ represents the next step in FIFA’s vision to make football truly global and inclusive, and it underpins FIFA’s core mission of expanding and developing football globally. Ultimately, FIFA+ reflects a cultural shift in the way different types of football fans want to connect with and explore the global game. It will accelerate the democratisation of football and at a time when the globe is facing financial challenges, FIFA+ brings the beautiful game to life for free.

The YES Network, the most-watched regional sports network in the US, launched its self-built live-streaming mobile app, the YES App, in March 2021. The YES App provides subscribers with a live stream of the YES Network, which included New York Yankees, Brooklyn Nets, New York City FC, and New York Liberty games. The YES App has seen a year-over-year increase of unique-per-game viewership for Yankees games of 35% in 2022 and saw a 240% year over year increase in 2021 over its previous streaming partner.

The interactive graphic overlays built using Evertz Ease Live SaaS (software-as –a-service), takes the fan experience to another level by engaging fans with dynamic and personalized storytelling content on top of the live streams of the different teams. Fans can access live game stats, polls, quizzes and facts without leaving the live video stream and app. The YES App additional features include: watch parties, where fans can invite their friends to a live video chat as they watch the game (fully synchronized for all participants); and its free-to-play, Pick-N-Play Live, that allows fans to make in-game predictions without leaving the live video stream.

The interactivity of the YES App, have helped bring larger audiences for the various teams and sports, where daily user registrations are up 45% year-over-year season to date; the total number hours viewed on the app is up 83%; unique viewers per game have climbed 33%; and the time spent per unique viewer has risen 10%. The increased engagements have provided YES Network with increased revenues with additional advertising units.

Warner Bros. Discovery – Best Digital First Production

Every unmissable moment of Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 on discovery+

For the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) delivered the ultimate fan-first digital experience for viewers on discovery+ – WBD’s streaming product which includes sport.

WBD’s primary objective was to drive viewership and subscriptions to discovery+ and establish it as the ‘Streaming Home of the Olympics’.
To achieve this, discovery+ delivered an unrivalled live digital content offer and was the only place to watch every unmissable moment from Beijing 2022, whenever, wherever, live and on-demand including streaming of 16 live event feeds covering every event.

discovery+ delivered around 1,200 hours of live coverage, with 56 simultaneous streams on the busiest day of the Games, going way beyond the capacity of a traditional linear broadcast, providing new ways of consuming the Games.

Launched just 18 months prior to the Games, the Olympics on discovery+ delivered record digital audience engagement for millions of fans across key markets in Denmark, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the UK and Ireland.

Tennis Channel, the only media company dedicated to the sport of tennis on a 24/7/365 basis, launched Tennis Channel International in May 2020 to provide tennis fans outside of the United States with unparalleled coverage and story telling of this incredible global sport. Entering the “Best Digital First Production” category, Tennis Channel International has changed the game in digital production. With only a small team, Tennis Channel International is pioneering a new era in sports production and distribution and in only 2 years has streamed over 3,000 matches, presented multi-court coverage, streamed multiple tournaments and as many as 16 matches simultaneously, provided bounce coverage, incorporated local language commentary and utilized dynamic graphics and promotion to 24/7 FAST channels and subscription services in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Greece, UK and India. All done without on-site personnel, without production trucks, without master control rooms or an operations or transmission teams, and without dozens, if not hundreds, of employees.

Sticks and Glass is a boutique post production Facility in the heart of Leeds, specialising in innovation and digital workflows to service all aspects of the production process including Live Streaming.

The CBS Golazo Pre-Match Experience Champions League Coverage on TikTok, was a demanding project that required us to exercise the latest techniques to bring something truely unique to the TikTok platform. The aim was to develop the user experience to increase user retention and engagement in order to offer high level inclusive content to CBS’s OTT offering.

We’re submitting our project for the Best Digital First Production award as we believe that throughout the project we utilised innovative digital workflows to deliver a final product that greatly enhanced CBS’s already industry leading content. This was achieved by putting the user first at every step and leveraging multiple digital systems. The resulting product met all the aspirations of the project as well vastly reducing the carbon foot print and operator overhead.

Women’s Football has been exploding globally. With record stadium attendances and world-class super-stars lighting up the game, it is now up to us as broadcasters to continue to elevate the women’s game to existing and new audiences at scale through our digital platforms.

BUT… Women’s football is still a hard sell with the rusted-on male audience, so this exercise was about breaking down barriers and putting the women’s game on the same level as the men’s, by giving it the same care and attention to detail while using innovation to drive new ways of shifting perception.

As the Australian broadcaster for the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022, Optus Sport wanted to do something different, something no other broadcaster had done for the Women’s European Championships before. A dedicated daily vertical women’s football show centred around the Women’s Euros. The idea was this show could sit as both a Social and versioned for OTT show execution (no linear scheduling), with the social platform of choice being Snapchat through their Discover Show space.

The show was designed to reach an existing male audience but more importantly a new female audience on Snapchat while also serving our own paying customers on-platform. A dedicated space was built for the Show in our Women’s Euros competition page for the event on our OTT platform.

The show comprised of in-studio hosting with Michelle Escobar, shot on Sony a6600 in 4K, match highlights, at-the-ground reporters capturing the vibe and atmosphere on mobile phones and DJI Gimbal, fan colour, and UGC content from players and teams inside camp. The edit fast-paced to hold audience attention, with a graphic border acting as a timer around the frame.
The production of the show was pulled together from concept to publish from three locations – Sydney, Melbourne & across England. Optus Sport had just six staff working on the show to create a light-touch but high-impact digital-first production.

The 20 episodes of the Women’s Euros show needed to be geo-blocked to Australia, though has managed to achieve more than 250k views, with 48% of the audience being the strategic female demographic we were after. This compares favourably from our other platforms in which sit at <10% female audience.

Optus Sport linear channels took a back seat to digital-first programming through Women’s Euros, and we wouldn’t change it for a thing.

NBA Beat is a celebration of the effect the NBA has had on street culture in Japan, focusing on Fashion, Street Art, Music, Gaming and Manga.

During the NBA’s 75th Anniversary season, we want to provide content that excites and entertains our passionate audience in Japan – as we build up to the NBA Japan Games in Tokyo this September. This is the first time we have ever created a bespoke series focused on culture in Japan, aiming to connect to both our younger audience and to a generation who fell in love with the league in the 1990’s.

We all know that the number of channels and platforms in which sports content owners can distribute to is growing rapidly. With more options, comes more content and content versions to manage. The key to efficiency and optimizing revenue opportunities is the ability of content owners to harness the power of metadata and digital-first workflows to scale production and distribution.

Dalet Flex is a digital-first, media logistics solution that features advanced workflow orchestration and enterprise strength metadata capabilities to manage, publish and syndicate valuable content – whether that content is from a content producer located halfway around the world or content held within an on-premise or cloud-based archive – to any traditional broadcast, terrestrial, digital, and social channel simultaneously.

On the aggregation side, Dalet Flex manages the nuances of the various license agreements including start and expiration dates. Built-in quality control ensures all incoming sports content meets the required specifications the moment it is handed off. The underlying media asset management layer is what integrates content libraries and archives into the workflow. Dalet Flex ensures objects and metadata are connected across the content supply chain and assets are highly searchable across both content libraries and archives. For productions, Dalet Flex integrates key editing applications like Adobe Premiere Pro video via the Dalet FlexXTEND tool. Users can access content without ever leaving Adobe Premiere Pro. Key workflows can be triggered once an edit is complete, accelerating the delivery of packages for owned channels or direct to partners.

Dalet Flex offers the most flexibility in terms of deployment. It is a poly-cloud solution that also supports hybrid implementation where and when needed. It also supports microservices for expansion. Because Dalet Flex is hosted in the cloud, operators can work collaboratively across locations, even during the strictest of lockdowns ensuring key business continuity.

WePlay is a Growth Marketing specialist working with the world’s most exciting and ambitious brands in sport, entertainment, and lifestyle. We deliver a modernised approach to marketing to deliver audience and revenue growth for our partners.

Following an exceptional year in 2021 for UFC FIGHT PASS – The UFC’s SVOD/OTT platform – WePlay was tasked with providing further global subscriber growth for the platform in 2022, with ambitious targets set for all departments.

Two months into the year, the Russian sanctions put in place following the Ukrainian conflict saw a significant impact and loss of our subscriber base following the SWIFT blocking, meaning our growth targets were further threatened.

Our key consideration was finding new audiences to drive incremental subscriber growth across the year, outside of the in-market/engaged UFC fans in key markets.

Alongside the UFC, WePlay developed a glocalised omnichannel strategy to increase subscriber volumes while aliviating market saturation or off-setting blocked markets, in 2022.

The Rugby Network – a partnership between Major League Rugby and RugbyPass – is the first of its kind in North America and around the world, providing fans with a single destination for all of their rugby content needs, including live streaming of Major League Rugby matches, international matches, USA Collegiate Rugby matches, highlights, podcasts and exclusive behind-the-scenes content. The decision was taken to keep the platform free for the first season and the second season as part of a wider, and longer-term, monetisation strategy. After the success of season one in 2021, with The Rugby Network gathering momentum with a significant number of sign-ups, the bold decision was made to double the target for 2022. Fifty-Three Six took on the task of aiding The Rugby Network to reach its targets.

Optus Sport is unapologetically out to use our platform’s, and our social channels to build a community of football fans where representation and equality is the norm. As Australian rights holder’s of the FA Barclays Women’s Super League and the Premier League they are uniquely positioned to push the boundaries of how these leagues are promoted. Their OneLove campaign is simple, by changing how they present the concept of ‘club’ across their channels, they changed how they present gender in the promotion of the platform, match fixtures and their brand. Social creative presented fixtures using club based imagery that presented the men’s and women’s fixtures together with key fixture information. Club based competition’s were used to generate organic engagement and draw fans into the campaign. Changes were made to the OTT platform to remove gender from the user experience.

The NBA Playoffs mark the culmination of every NBA season. Throughout the 2021-22 NBA season – the league’s 75th anniversary season – fans across the globe witnessed historic performances, edge-of-your-seat finishes, emphatic dunks, and mesmerizing dimes. For a number of reasons, many of these moments were not witnessed in real time; being at work and a specific game being unavailable on local broadcast meant that some of these moments were only heard about, and not seen – a problem solved by NBA League Pass, the league’s premium live game subscription service – and brought to the front of our fans’ minds through our “Never Miss” Marketing Campaign.

NBA fandom is universal, but the reasons for fandom are as diverse as the global community itself. For this Playoffs campaign, we took an in-depth look at the moments that mattered to our fans across Australia, the Philippines, and New Zealand; through our social insights and viewership data we identified the meaningful moments that permeated the social conversation, the news media conversation, and the water-cooler conversation, and we undertook customer research to determine the right value proposition for our different customer segments. These powerful moments formed the foundation of a data-led and emotively resonant marketing campaign that was rolled out across multiple markets, one that we iterated as other notable moments happened during the playoffs, allowing our consumer advertising to reflect real-time conversations around the playoffs, as new narratives unfolded and ultimately position NBA League Pass as the only place to watch every moment, live, this Playoffs and beyond.

ViewLift is a global leader in building innovative and scalable video experiences by offering its proprietary streaming solutions to sports leagues, clubs, rights holders and other media companies.

ViewLift’s clientele includes NBCUniversal, Monumental Sports & Entertainment, Buzzer, RugbyPass, Major League Rugby, MotoAmerica, TEGNA, Nexstar and many others.

ViewLift’s best-in-class solutions help D2C streaming properties distribute content via web, mobile, OTT, smart TVs and gaming consoles, and monetize with flexible hybrid business models. ViewLift’s real-time deep analytics help businesses make data-driven business decisions. ViewLift owns a proprietary full tech stack that gives our clients a competitive advantage to go to market quickly with extensive purpose-built feature sets to acquire and retain viewers, along with delivering a captivating viewer experience.

ViewLift’s newest addition to the platform are integrations of betting, gambling and other interactive features to enhance the fan experience.

2022 is marked as a breakthrough year with a wave of novelty services booming the market and impacting the different domains, following years of video-AI tech development and several key services disrupting the media ecosystem.

Videocites patented video-AI technology is disrupting the media landscape. The novel ability to track every Organic Boost (UGC, fan created content) is a key for new services that increase the value for all parties involved, including the fans themselves, and open many monetization streams. The services presented are the tip of the iceberg, and many new values and implementations are constantly being built for the benefit of the entire industry.

Magnifi has found an extremely strong product-market fit in serving enterprises across numerous industries – OTT players, broadcasters, sports clubs and leagues, marketing agencies, e-gaming platforms and more. An AI led video analysis and editing solution for automated video editing and meta tagging, enterprises can produce social-ready micro-content at both speed and scale using our platform.

Magnifi is an ideal candidate for the Best Emerging Tech Award as its technology is changing the game in sports broadcast editing, streaming and distribution.

With the rise in popularity of highlights being shared via services such as Google Web Stories, Magnifi is delivering industry-first features thanks to its unique AI-enabled Ball Tracking technology – alleviating the need for users to manually analyse, resize and crop video to meet the dimensions and orientation required by these popular services.

Magnifi’s AI-powered platform with unique features such as AI-enabled Ball Tracking is emerging as a best-in-class technology that’s helping organisations within the sports umbrella increase reach, drive engagement, and boost ROI. Beyond enhancing and improving the video production process, Magnifi opens the door for additional monetization opportunities, including personalised content and new revenue streams from existing content, all through the application of innovative technology solutions.

The growth of the OTT subscription model has made churn management a priority for streaming platforms. Though tackling churn is immensely challenging and complex, the rewards for solving the churn problem are enormous. Just a 2% reduction in monthly churn amounts to a 22% higher lifetime value per subscription, and an MRR increase of almost 25% over 12 months.

Cleeng is a SaaS platform specialized in Subscriber Retention Management (SRM™) for the Media and Entertainment industry. Key to Cleeng’s performance as retention specialists is a data science focus on what actually causes churn, and how to stop it. This is why we set out to elevate our subscriber data platform beyond understanding subscriber behavior, to also predicting it, with the Churn Prediction Algorithm.

The Churn Prediction Algorithm was built over 18 months using millions of payment, subscription, and customer behavior data points from over 250 broadcasters on our platform. The algorithm now predicts customer churn with up to 92% accuracy, helping our customers outperform industry benchmarks for churn and winback rates. By assigning all subscribers a churn probability and churn reason, the algorithm allows OTT providers to target at-risk subscribers and prevent them from churning.

Cleeng’s access to millions of subscription data points paired with finely tuned machine learning technology gave us the unique opportunity to create a solution for the industry-wide churn challenge. We are submitting our Churn Prediction Algorithm for the Best Emerging Tech Company category due for the key role that we see AI churn management playing in the near future. With industry churn rates showing no sign of slowing, the potential impact of this product is immense as more and more SVOD platforms will reach the point where leveraging advanced churn solutions is non-negotiable for continued success.

Spiideo’s automated sports video solutions are trusted by media rights-holders, leagues, federations, clubs and schools – all around the world. Spiideo’s fixed and mobile camera systems for both indoor and outdoor sports, feature automatic recording, AutoFollow, and virtual panorama technology that integrates directly with both Spiideo Perform (Analysis) and Spiideo Play (automatic production).

As a candidate for Emerging Tech Company, Spiideo represents the changing shift in the media and OTT industries. Professional broadcasts have typically been reserved for the elite leagues and teams. But as technology unlocks this for other levels in the pyramid, Spiideo offers an OTT platform and integrations with existing streaming services for the best user-experience. From the same camera systems, rights-holders, leagues, and teams can also offer Spiideo Perform analysis tools for player and team development – improving the product on the field.

Spiideo’s technology is transforming the ROI that rights-holders require for creating the best experiences. By being cloud-based, Spiideo empowers these organizations to schedule and maintain thousands of broadcasts simultaneously. By installing Spiideo automated camera systems and using unique tools such as AutoFollow, CloudStudio Anywhere™, CloudControl, video overlays, and mobile streaming; they are covering events that otherwise wouldn’t be available for consumption.

As the leader in automated broadcasting and analysis, Spiideo’s solution is being used by organizations – such as the Gothia Cup, Dana Cup, Ringier Sports, and MLS NEXT PRO – to scale broadcasting to fans, parents, and friends across the globe. In a single week, for example, Gothia Cup was able to broadcast 2,000+ matches to 177,000 viewers by deploying 43 automated Spiideo camera systems across Gothenburg, Sweden.

Bleachr is an emerging tech leader in the mobile sports app space, recognized in the industry for its revolutionary face-to-face OTT streaming platform that changes the paradigm from passive viewing to interactive. Bleachr’s cutting-edge tech was awarded the 2021 SportsPro OTT Silver Award for Innovation of the Year and Sports Tech Award for Best Digital Technology.

Bleachr just launched its Crowd Solutions for sports clubs, which allows teams to integrate any of our popular mobile tech features into their existing apps. The CrowdLIVE platform integration is the one feature that many clubs have been waiting for as it changes the paradigm from passive broadcast viewing to an interactive live stream experience for fans.

This interactive face-to-face live streaming platform serves as a broadcast studio in the palm of your hand – radically transforming the current sports broadcast paradigm. CrowdLIVE gives rights holders, teams and individuals a new way to broadcast events, build and monetize their fandom, and capture valuable data. It has a configurable center stage for live streams, video content, and interactive social games. Public or private events can host up to 1 million fans, with 36 fans on camera at a time & a front row for commentators & VIP guests.

CrowdLIVE has proven itself through numerous global use cases, including the Bundesliga’s FC Köln, Duke University, ESPN sports talk radio broadcasters, and Bleachr’s own TennisONE App.

Bleachr is now rapidly changing the tennis industry with its global TennisONE App. After developing custom standalone apps for the majority of the U.S. Open Series and other prestigious tournaments like the Miami Open and Rolex Paris Masters, the company responded to fan demand for fewer apps by turning its successful white-label platform into ONE global app. The TennisONE App features live, year-round coverage, serving as the “Official App” of more than 20 premier partner events. In 2022, TennisONE became the first media group in history to stream the entire NCAA Division I Championships—536,000 hours of live tennis.

YBVR is at the forefront of technology and as a rapidly growing start-up is helping to build the most complete immersive streaming platform for Live Events in the Metaverse. YBVR has a leading position in immersive sports streaming due to a combination of unique technology, a vertically integrated approach. YBVR has successfully powered immersive streaming for top-tier clients in the sports industry.

YBVR is re-defining the way fans experience live sports. Fans can now experience the magic of ‘being there’ from anywhere. YBVR tech enables a new immersive and interactive dialogue with sport fans, especially the new generations, engaging from home and in-venue. YBVR’s cloud-based tech empowers sport event organisers and rightsholders with new angles for engagement and monetisation. Fans can decide when, how, what and with whom to enjoy live streaming with premium viewing experiences, in real-time, high-quality streaming and across any device. Combine this experience with a patented Field-of-View optimization that consumes up to 90 percent less bandwidth, makes it an incredible market offering.

With great excitement, YBVR is applying for the Best Start Up Tech Company 2022. YBVR has been developing the immersive streaming solution for over 5 years, anticipating major consumer adoption and user experience trends that now, with the surge of the Metaverse as a trending topic, are becoming evident for all. This has been possible due to the early adaptation and evolution of YBVR products which empower Live Event Immersive Experiences. Lastly, YBVR has been able to craft the solution fans want. Over the years of product development, it has been possible for YBVR to learn from the early stages of experimentation to create a reliable offering of the OTT industry needs. Understanding the end user journey and having the completeness of vision, has resulted in transforming our ideas and proposals into real use cases for our customers.

SpoLive is a Tokyo-based sports tech startup founded at the end of 2020 with the vision of “Bringing sports fans closer to athletes and teams with the power of digital.” It provides a platform for data management and fan communication for emerging sports organizations. Through SpoLive, sports organizations large and small can “streamline data collection, management, and dissemination” and “provide a stadium-like sense of unity and participation for fans watching remotely.” Unlike social media game bulletins and live streams, SpoLive allows for structured management of “who plays in the game,” “who did what in what minute,” “how the score went,” and “what the stats are,” which are automatically and immediately delivered to the application. The video can be distributed by each organization, like YouTube. It is accessible to even light fans since fans can view detailed player information whenever they want, which was difficult with conventional distribution, and can easily confirm members and check rules and other terminology. Thus, regardless of the tournament’s scale, information is disseminated at a granular level similar to professional sports, creating an unprecedented experience in which players, officials, and fans can instantly check information on games in distant areas and cheer on the players. Furthermore, the improved transparency and accessibility of data have also made it possible for players and teams to look back and use the information to inspire and enhance each other. Today, it is familiar to more than several hundred organizations, both inside and outside of Japan. It has become a place where people can experience sports games in a completely new way. Some fans have commented, “It’s as much fun as going to the stadium.

‘Seyu – Together for victory!’ is the innovative idea of a sports enthusiasts who wanted to surround themselves with like minded professionals to work for the same objective – create a lasting experience for fans. An experience through which they not only feel more connected to the sport itself, but also connecting with their fellow supporters. Seyu proved its concept in 400+ sports events across 13 countries in 19 different sports, enabling 170.000+ fans to show their devotion in real-time from anywhere in the world. While involving in-stadia fans, as well, we give remote supporters the chance to take selfies, add a motivational messages and post them with custom-branded frames on various platforms, let it be an online livestream of an event, a giant screen of a stadium, or the social media page of a right holder.

Selfies get approved in 6 seconds through our AI based moderation which filters out explicit content such as nudity, guns, forbidden symbols, salesmanship (by fans) and any other sensitive content in agreement with our clients. Our platform is available through web microsites, native apps (both white-labeled) or could be integrated into existing applications (SDK).
Branded, moderated selfies can also be posted by fans on all social media channels and photo libraries can also be shared by our rights holders to drive high social media organic reach thanks to emotionally charged fan interactions.

Throughout our fan experience we gather demographic, geographic, behavioural and other market intelligence with the consent of fans and assist our partners to tailor their offerings. Seyu generates huge, measured attentive reach for teams and sponsors as a result of the involving fan experience .
Our services can also help brands, sponsors to create new marketing campaigns or enhance current ones while creating an emotional bridge with potential consumers while generating new leads for partners for a fraction of the market price.

Many content owners have limited resources and struggle every day to manage all their digital assets (website, apps, OTT, digital archive), being forced to use multiple dashboards not connected to each other, with big time consuming, lack of efficiency and expenses increasing.
Our innovative cloud-based MultiMedia Center (MMC), merges different products in one single Dashboard, from Content Management System (CMS) to Video Management System (VMS) and Digital Assets Managements (DAM), allowing our customers to manage the entire multimedia workflow for one single point of control. With its scalable encoding system and user-friendly interface will allow our partners to manage all their digital assets and associated platforms, improving content distribution and drastically cutting all the running costs.
We go beyond the traditional OTT development approach, by allowing our clients to become tech providers themselves thanks to our solutions. With HiWay’s MMC, a sports league/federation can launch its own OTT, and then enable all its associated clubs/members to create and manage their own channels independently, remaining part of a bigger integrated digital ecosystem, that will maximize distribution and monetization.

It will be possible to easily create widgets interconnected to the main OTT, that can be embedded by third parties, increasing the reach, and generating further revenue streams with advertising. All this being built on top of our proprietary encoding system, creating efficient processes that can help our clients to take advantage of the full potential of video content, automating the workflows and minimizing the costs.

We firmly believe that UX comes first, which is why we focus on creating personalized and meaningful experiences when designing and developing all our platforms. From mobile and Smart TV apps, to websites, and OTT platforms, we develop everything in-house by using the most advanced technologies.

Griiip is a technology startup that is changing the motorsport industry from the ground up. We have developed a cloud-based data platform that makes real-time racing data available to motorsport fans, media, the gaming ecosystem, and OEMs.
While the global motorsport industry is rooted in technology, the viewing experience and fan engagement platforms have fallen behind other sports. In many ways, racing series are still using 20th-century tools and systems, and as a result, fanbase engagement and monetization opportunities have suffered. Furthermore, less than 10% of sophisticated motorsport events data is accessible or used for a wider audience.

Griiip started as a car manufacturer and a racing series owner, and understands the pains of these clients first hand. The reason for the creation of RAMP (RAcing Media Platform) was for internal usage, as we hadn’t found any efficient solutions on the market, and quickly understood this is a general issue in the market. Due to that, we are already working and cashing-in from top leagues like DTM, received investment from Porsche Ventures (among other investors from both the motor as well as the sports betting ecosystem), and attracted attention from other racing series and manufacturers.

Our solution collects data in real-time from various sources, including in-house developed LTE-based telemetry solution and external sources such as timing services, and sends all to a central cloud platform, where it is immediately analyzed to create data-driven products such as live production graphics, 2nd screen fan engagement platform, live fantasy and sports betting applications, as well as coaching and predictive maintenance tools for teams and manufacturers.
Coming into 2023, Griiip is now talking with the biggest names in the sport. With its present and future partners, Griiip can fulfill its vision and create the best viewing experience for motorsport using data!

Ceeblue is a bootstrapped start up, founded in 2017. We are headquartered in the Netherlands but our team stretches from Germany to Spain.

Our team is uniquely made up not only of video streaming experts, but also by network and cloud engineers with decades of experience. Together, these teams have created a singular, end-to-end solution that provides content providers with sub-500ms video transcoding and delivery.

Our end-to-end cloud is supremely optimized in order to shave milliseconds off wherever it is humanly possible to do so.

This means that content providers can achieve nearly simultaneous delivery of live events, regardless of the medium, in stark contrast to the gaping disconnect that currently occurs between content delivered via OTT vs broadcast.

We understand that we all now live in a world of mobile content consumption, and our product is mobile-ready straight out of the box. It also incorporates unique solutions that guarantee video delivery even under suboptimal network conditions or in remote regions.

We support broadcast-grade protocols, along with UHD video formats and HQ audio codecs, and have supported companies including Unified Streaming, JW Player, Groupe Casino, and LIDL.

We feel that we are the BEST STARTUP TECH COMPANY because of both the above points as well as our unique take on a problem that affects every single streaming platform – latency.

Sub-500ms glass-to-glass delivery provides not only an unparalleled viewer experience, but the opportunity for content providers to create opportunities involving audience engagement and interactivity, which can involve novel revenue streams.

It is Ceeblue’s aspiration to facilitate this sea change in the OTT space and become the world’s go-to live video streaming provider.