By: Greg Doggett
As viewers consume content in growing quantities, their standards for content quality rise in tandem. Live sports broadcasting is no different. High-quality sports broadcasts are engaging and immersive. In 2023, you can easily produce and deliver this content using next-generation technology solutions. Let’s examine how you can create high-quality sports broadcasts more easily, quickly, and with a longer shelf life.
Create Engaging Fan Experiences That Stand the Test of Time
Social media platforms are powerful tools for live sports broadcasters to engage with their audience, promote the broadcast, and share additional content to build loyalty with their overall brand. Additional interactive features like polls are great for increasing viewer engagement, while providing production teams with valuable insights into their audience. Broadcasters who implement these features keep viewers immersed in the content for longer, simultaneously collecting actionable analytics for future content strategies.
In a previous blog, we outlined three strategies for producing high-quality sports broadcasts. As new trends and technologies emerge, producing this content can become even more complicated. Deciding which new solutions, formats, and technology to adopt will become a crucial step in weighing the costs versus benefits of a given live sports broadcast production. Cutting-edge solutions on the market support less common, next-generation video formats like 8K or immersive 360-degree video and augmented reality. But those are still ahead of their time and not necessarily worth investing in yet.
To ensure production technology solutions are as future-proof as possible, industry leaders have begun adopting some of these new standards already. Even though they are still emerging, to make sure sports broadcast productions are top-quality and keeping pace with fan’s expectations, accommodating these formats is not as much a matter of “if” but a matter of “when” they will become table-stakes.
Streamline Production Workflows Without Compromising on Quality
While 8K, mixed reality, and 360-degree video are still niche formats, hybrid and cloud-based production workflows have become much more mainstream and widely used in recent years. Today, live sports broadcasters have access to a range of cutting-edge tools and technologies that can help them produce high-quality sports broadcasts in a streamlined and efficient production environment – even if some stakeholders are remote. One overarching enabler of this is a cloud-native video production workflow, so broadcasters can collaborate in real-time and work from anywhere in the world. Collaboration tools can enhance elements like media and content management, live editing, content inspection, and correction. Building efficient remote production and post production workflows allows any sports broadcast production operation to become a standout content provider.
Beyond enabling remote and hybrid productions, automating common post production finishing tasks is another great way to facilitate producing high-quality sports broadcasts more quickly. This can include caption creation and correction, video quality control and waveform monitoring, and transcoding for different screen sizes and consumption methods. For example, high-quality sports broadcasts typically leverage content sized for TV screens, social media feeds, and large-format LED screens in stadiums. A game-changing solution for sports broadcast production groups would automate the creation of these deliverables, without quality loss.
Leverage Intelligent Content Management Solutions to Easily Find Media Wherever It Resides
Everyone who produces, stores, and distributes high-quality sports broadcasts and content knows the pain of searching for specific media assets across vast libraries of storage systems. Nothing is more important to meeting commitments and satisfying viewer expectations on time (and at reasonable costs) than an optimized and well-designed content management platform. Accessing assets that are scattered across a combination of on-prem tapes, disks, and cloud storage – perhaps even involving multiple network protocols, file systems, and media formats – is critical.
A flexible and intelligent solution will make finding necessary assets as simple as possible for sports broadcasting teams. This could involve quickly pulling brand assets during a live production, like interstitials or bumpers for commercial breaks or transitions between feeds, or finding clips in archives for compilations and highlights on social media. Regardless of how the media is being used, having easy, quick access to these specific assets is critical in production and post production workflows.
Sports broadcasters who strategically choose a well-designed content management platform can take full advantage of any combination of stored media assets from whatever storage systems are in play. This will allow them to meet the most demanding linear and time-shifted service requirements at any scale. Critically, this content management platform allows content providers to meet rising fan expectations while enabling significant production cost optimizations.
The Highlight Reel – Producing High-Quality Sports Broadcasts
Sports content producers need to focus on intelligent, cost-effective, and automated ways to facilitate the production of high-quality sports broadcasts. This can easily be enabled through new-age technology, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as pre-existing technology solutions that have been modernized for the current era. For starters, this involves enabling partially or wholly remote production staff to contribute to an efficient sports broadcast operation, leveraging cloud services to automate time-intensive post production workflows. Taking it a step further, implementing intelligent content management workflows will optimize costs, speed up production timelines, and generate the most revenue for the broadcaster. For more information about Telestream’s solutions to produce high-quality sports broadcasts and automate post production workflows, visit www.telestream.net.