With the global sports market expected to grow to a worth of $623bn by 2027, the demand for content has never been higher. And sports fans aren’t only looking for live match experiences; they want to relive the most iconic sporting moments, watch footage from behind the scenes, and to feel closer to their favorite teams and players than ever before. This demand sparks both challenges and opportunities for sports broadcasters as they aim to deliver content that not only captivates and engages an audience, but also brings in new streams of revenue to their organization.
Capitalizing on demand
Over the decades, broadcasters will have accumulated thousands of hours’ worth of sports footage. And with fans wanting additional content, these archives can be strategically leveraged as a source of revenue. Historic moments can be packaged as premium content or marketed to specific audiences through subscription models and targeted advertising. However, to respond rapidly to demand, and to gain the competitive edge, sports broadcasters need to be able to access that existing content quickly and easily.
Traditionally, footage will have been stored on spools and LTO tapes which raises concern around long-term preservation. There have been instances of whole archives lost to disasters, and once physical assets have been destroyed, there is no way to get them back. Likewise, accessibility and retrieval time rates are considerably low which makes it near impossible to respond to breaking sporting news in an efficient manner. And while there has been a recent surge in organizations moving assets to the public cloud, the unpredictable costs associated with retrieving content can make it a less-than-ideal option.
Long-term preservation for maximum monetization
Digitization is a crucial step for the future of our sporting content. By investing time to move assets away from legacy formats and into the digital realm, broadcasters can preserve and safeguard their sports content for decades to come. But as we mentioned above, lifting and shifting to the public cloud won’t solve all problems. Thankfully, issues around cost, security, and performance can be addressed by implementing a media-focused and software-defined object storage platform.
Using object-based storage for long-term content preservation ensures sporting events of yesterday are instantly available today, while the events of today remain accessible and usable for future generations. Opportunities for monetizing content become favorable, especially when assets within the archive are optimized with AI/ML technology and enriched metadata availability. This makes it much easier to manage, discover, and utilize your assets for reuse and re-monetization.
Example: A well-loved sporting legend unexpectedly announces his retirement from the sport. With traditional archive methods, it would take a significantly longer amount of time to manually search hours of footage to build a compilation of their ‘best bits’. With metadata enriched object storage, entering the sportsperson’s name is enough to locate clips and footage featuring them. With the latter, organizations can avoid egress fees as content remains accessible from any location, at any time. Once the required assets are made available, they can be packaged for premium subscribers, leveraged by advertisers, and even sold to other sports content providers.
Presented with immediate access to their archive content, sports media organizations can fully exploit opportunities for monetization without sabotaging their potential revenue on wasted time, resources, and download costs. Digitization is the first step in empowering broadcasters to not only preserve sporting legacies, but to tap into additional revenue generating streams – while simultaneously meeting the demands of diverse audiences.
Perifery works with sports organizations around the globe, providing secure, scalable, and reliable nearline archive storage solutions that ensure your sports media content is always available when it’s needed. Get started today to maximize and monetize your archives.
