What is the future of live TV?

TV Connect / Knect365

For the all the sheer market force of video on demand the allure of appointment to view TV appears undiminished. This is especially the case around programming that incorporates live elements like Saturday Night Takeaway or Strictly Come Dancing, both averaging over 8 million viewers in their primetime weekend slot on the BBC and ITV respectively. 

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There’s no content more suited to live, though, than sports and one advantage it has over light entertainment is that there is lots of it around (successful LE formats are rare) and still fans can’t seem to get enough.

The mantra that live sports programming is “the battering ram” on which to build and secure a pay TV business, remains as true today as when Rupert Murdoch uttered it a decade ago. Except that now a sportscaster must extend distribution online and particularly on mobile to halt subscriber churn and to reach millennials.

Competition between pay-TV broadcasters has already driven the value of premium sports rights to all-time highs. Now cash-rich internet players are muscling into the sports arena.

“With sports fans so overwhelmingly eager to pay to access their favourite competitions, there is tremendous scope to further monetise sports on TV,” Ampere Analysis’ Alexios Dimitropoulos said in accompaniment to recent research on the topic. “The challenge will be to balance the enthusiasm for niche competitions, particularly evident among younger viewers, with the demand for big ticket events such as the Champion’s League. Online services have a chance to maximise this demand, with an expanded offering of sports events, and that’s why we’re seeing Facebook, Amazon and Twitter make their first forays into this space.”

This is especially the case for the relatively small number of sports events and brands that have genuinely global appeal.  The exclusivity of those rights is a major factor in driving subscriptions.

“For both traditional broadcasters and their new internet competitors, a new battleground is emerging and once again sports content is at the heart of it,” declares Comcast Technology Solutions (CTS) in a white paper [https://www.comcasttechnologysolutions.com/resources/sports-new-battleground-premium-ott] written with CDN Akamai. “The winners will be those most able to acquire, deliver and generate value from premium sports content for a new generation of fans.”

As the cost of rights increases, monetisation has never been more acute. Established providers and internet upstarts alike have to change the offer away from the same pricing model for every fan or every event.

“In practice, this means offering a menu of payment models, including the ability to easily subscribe (and unsubscribe), or to select from a menu of à la carte content, including skinny bundles and one-off events,” suggests CTS. “For some users, it may also mean exploring ad-funded or freemium alternatives to a choice of direct payment models.”

But it will take more than fresh business models and an opening of wallets for OTT to take-over mainstream sports coverage. OTT will need to deliver on the high production values viewers have to expect from broadcast.

Essential Quality of Service

“Fans are accustomed to high-resolution, reliable and low-latency feeds, and expect the same level of service over IP on their TV – indeed, many now expect this on their mobile device as well,” says CTS.

Latency (the lag between broadcast and simulcast streaming) and buffering (playback pauses) continue to dog sports streamers.

Sports-centric SVOD service DAZN suffered these glitches when launching into Canada with exclusive NFL coverage at the start of last season. Discovery-owned Eurosport also had to apologise to subscribers and offer refunds when its Bundesliga live streams were similarly hit.

According to CDN Limelight Networks, over half of consumers think buffering is the most frustrating aspect of watching online video, and 46% will stop watching a video if it stops to buffer twice, rising to 80% when a video buffers three times.

No such issues appear to have hindered Eurosport or NBCU’s digital coverage of the recent Winter Olympics but the issue is one of scale. While it’s true that more people are watching live sports online, the vast majority are still glued to the TV. In NBCU’s case digital views to the Games averaged around 2% of its TV audience figures.

It’s worth noting that combined digital and linear ratings for NBCU were down, highlighting perhaps a specific decline in interest of the Olympics and/or a wider cultural issue in attracting sustained viewing to live sports. There is evidence that mobile-first fans prefer highlights clips, behind the scenes editorial and greater personalization.

The future delivery of live sport is thought to evolve into a highly personalised experience in which individuals might perhaps (via their own interaction or via Artificially Intelligent automated production) have almost total control over the angles of play they watch, the AR data that overlays the action, or social media influencers that commentate on it.

As it stands the internet does not have enough capacity to unicast to everyone who want this in HD let alone for bandwidth consuming applications like 4K UHD. Capacity may grow every year, but so does traffic. Most CDNs plan optimization strategies to provide the best service within the amount of bandwidth available.

Managing traffic
Internet delivery is subject to many contentious factors, including CDN capacity, congestion over the internet to edge, bottlenecks from the edge to the home, Wi-Fi connectivity to the end device and mobile live streams are hit by unreliable network coverage or congestion.

Premium sports is usually detailed and highly dynamic, which requires HD to be delivered at a high frame rate (50 or 60 Hz), necessitating higher bitrates, at least when watching on large screen TVs. Higher bitrates add to the network load. 

This quality of experience is important. Akamai research finds that a viewer’s emotional connection to content at 5Mbps generates a higher emotional engagement than for viewers watching the same content at lower bitrates.

An alleged failure to make good on an HD service resulted in a class action brought against Showtime for its online payperview of the Mayweather vs McGregor fight in August 2017. Live stream piracy – which also afflicted the Showtime internet service – needs constant attention too, according to the Media + Networks+ survey.

For many sports fans, a quality of service is as much about the immediacy of the content and when that gets undermined by lags in streaming to second - the experience can fall apart. The latency of an end-to-end OTT distribution system can be as high as 70 seconds, or as low as 3 seconds, behind that of broadcast.

Formula 1 is about to launch its live streamed OTT service but this won’t be tied to the broadcast feed although in tests with streaming services provider Tata Communications, F1 reports that it has managed to achieve synchronicity. The issue is again that of scale. While a live OTT and live to broadcast feeds could be synched for one broadcaster in one country, rolling out the service globally would be hindered by different levels of national network infrastructure.

The emerging 5G network could hold the keys. With negligible latency and speeds starting at 1Gbps use cases include realtime streams of multiple 4K UHD videos, or 180-360 panoramas – reckoned to be the live immersive sports experience many fans crave. Japan’s NHK is already planning to capture 8K VR streams of action from the Tokyo Games routed over a 5G network which is being built around the city.

While the capacity crunch may seem like a subject best suited to technology forums, Guido Meardi, CEO at video compression specialist V-Nova is adamant it is a critical business issue that everyone in the video content chain needs to address.

“In terms of monetisation this is a trainwreck waiting to happen because substandard performance is likely to result in subscriber churn and advertisers going somewhere else. It’s a critical problem that many in the industry have no idea about.”

Follow the discussion at TV Connect by debating the gold standard of Quality of Service with Elliott Seller, Head of Interactive TV at Sky and Brendan Hole, BT TV’s Content Architect [Wednesday, 9 May 14:30 - 14:50]; Chart ‘The rise of the ‘live’ sports fan’ with David Bailey, Senior Research Manager, Formula 1 [9 May, 16:45 - 17:05]. Join Sky’s Director of Systems & Development, Jeff Eales for the insightful panel session asking How far do we take personalisation? [9 May, 14:30 - 15:10].

What is AI’s killer app when it comes to video distribution and is there any limit to what AI and automation can do? Learn what experts from ITV and Nova Broadcasting think [10 May 12:10 - 12:50] and continue with the challenging question ‘Have we been oversold on 5G’s consumer impact?’ [Thursday, 10 May, 15:30 - 16:15]. Plus, gain a sneak peak at the next Olympics – Tokyo 2020 - through the eyes of Discovery [10 May, 15:30 - 15:50].