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If extended reality (XR) is the next field in sports broadcasting it could jump into the mainstream come summer 2026, when the FIFA World Cup lands in the US, Mexico and Canada.
HBS is one of three founding members of a new XR Sports Alliance
designed to accelerate research and bring to market immersive sports
applications for a new generation of consumer device.
Speaking to SVG
Europe, HBS director of digital, Johannes Franken points to past VR experiments
at the FIFA World Cup in Russia and the AR service offered at the FIFA World
Cup in Qatar.
“While these were
mostly used as marketing or proof of concept type of use cases, when we look
forward we believe that these are the technologies where we need to be
successful,” he says.
“It’s no secret
that there is [not a huge] amount of headsets in the market but we see that
there are some roadblocks to create a viable business case for that. That was
one of the reasons why we thought we should found this alliance and bring many
parties together, because solving those roadblocks can only be achieved as a
group.
“Taking knowledge
from content creation and service delivery out of social media productions and
transferring that into the XR world is our goal in the alliance.”
While HBS explores
ways to produce immersive XR sports content, the other partners in the alliance
– chip maker Qualcomm and OTT video solutions provider Accedo – lead on device
manufacture and distribution.
Accedo will explore
monetisation, data intelligence and would build the user experience. It will
also advise on the kind of features sports rights owners should test first and
experiment with and create a user testing panel.
“Initially we were
thinking about prioritising the in-home use case, but more and more we’re
hearing that rights owners and stadium or venue owners are also looking at how
to enhance the in-venue experience,” says Lucy Trang Nguyen, business
development director, XR, Accedo. “The technology and test framework that we’re
building for in-home could potentially also be leveraged for the stadium
experience.”
Patrick Costello,
senior director for business development at Qualcomm, says sports XR
applications are a top three interest among its users.
“We’ve been
investing in XR R&D for over 15 years and that manifests itself today in a
very robust hardware and software roadmap. We have a dedicated XR silicon
roadmap and we address all sorts of types of devices and architectures. The aim
is to scale XR to the size and scope of something like mobile at some point.”
Qualcomm is even
considering developing “a purpose-built device for XR sports viewing”, says
Costello.
“We see the XR
market developing a little bit differently than mobile. We are already seeing
purpose-built devices for the medical vertical, for defence, and fitness and
health devices. We really want to collect input from alliance members and see
if there is room for more of a dedicated sports viewing device for this market
and run that through the test framework.”
Carving out XR rights
XR is a nascent
term in media and requires some pinning down. This is part of the problem that
the alliance says it wants to solve.
“XR is the
companion to all the immersive technologies available today and something Apple
has called spatial computing,” explains Jose Somolinos, solutions strategist
and XR lead at Accedo. “Most headsets available now are not only VR or AR but
also MR, meaning they are equipped with cameras that let you see the outside
world (or passthrough) as if you were wearing glasses and displays that on a
screen in front of your eyes.”
There are a host of
technical problems from compression to delivery as well as improving the
comfort level of XR wearables, but there are commercial issues that the
alliance will address too.
“It is very, very
hard to define [XR] rights today,” stresses Franken. “How do they differentiate
from traditional AV rights? Are they a subset of AV rights? How do you separate
volumetric data within data rights? Every big sporting federation has their own
definition.”
Not only is there a
fragmented definition of XR as a media, there’s confusion over the marketing
implications too.
“How does a virtual
can of Red Bull compare to a board advertisement? These kinds of definitions
are all very fragmented and scattered over the market. What we are trying to do
is help federations and to define a more streamlined approach,” says Franken.
XR at Euro 2024
In an example of
the type of solution it brings to the field, Accedo has debuted an XR
sports streaming application during Euro 2024 as a showcase for Deutsche
Telekom’s sports streaming service MagentaSport.
The solution uses
Xtend, Accedo’s solution for XR applications complemented with tech from Ateme
and HISPlayer. It integrates live streams and data feeds and includes
interactive features such as live statistics, multi-camera feeds, player cards,
and 3D sponsored experiences.
In a release,
Accedo said the activation introduces fans to a viewing experience “that is no
longer constrained to the physical limitations of the TV screen.”
It described how
the application will blend fans’ physical and virtual worlds by displaying the
match in the space around the fan, while also introducing a new layer of
interaction where fans can access supplementary information such as team and
player statistics and watch replays from different angles. Additionally, it
enables sponsors to interact with fans in new ways to drive revenue.
Nguyen says
previous VR/AR experiments were mostly focused on the user experience “because
that was the novelty factor” to show the public what next-generation streaming
experiences could look like.
“Now we need to
take this to the finish line,” she says. “We need to see beyond the user
experience.”
To do this the
alliance has established a test framework described as an end-to-end program
for sports rights owners intended to accelerate time to market.
Within this, HBS is
bringing its expertise to bare on producing live immersive video formats. Among
other techniques it is examining capture from monoscopic, stereoscopic and
volumetric camera arrays, perhaps married to digital twin renders of stadiums and
realtime generated graphics. It could be 180 degrees or 360 degrees.
“There are a lot of
learnings that we have accumulated over the years about how to cover sports in
a different way,” Franken says. “It’s all very well having fancy and exotic
technology but making that work at scale for large events at the efficiency and
in the timeliness required to keep that content valuable – that’s a different
challenge.”
Another aspect is
XR editorial storytelling. “There is a question as to what extent you use
static wide shots,” adds Franken. “How much movement is acceptable in a virtual
environment? If you take football or soccer as an example, then there is very
little depth being captured from the main high camera platform. If you capture
that stereoscopically at pitch side with the players running towards you, that
immersion is really what we’re after.”
He suggests XR
production is likely to sit separately from the main 2D broadcast and that
“there will be a different set of production utilities for a different set of
deliverables and different size of tournament. Not everybody will have the
ability to afford a volumetric capture system.”
Recruitment phase
The fledgling
alliance wants to onboard one telco operator in key markets, which Nguyen
mentions as “Germany, Europe in general, South Korea, Japan, India, China and
the US”.
She says: “In each
of these important markets we are aiming to get at least one representative
telco. They will gain access to the white label test applications that we are
building within the alliance.”
Data on XR sports
would be used to shape and support business cases. “Together we will contribute
by testing in our respective markets so that we can collect insightful data and
report back to the alliance so that all the members can share this knowledge,”
she continues.
It is anticipated
that the first wave of network operators will be made public in three to four
months’ time. The alliance is also targeting OEMs and ecosystem technology
providers. “The reason why we want to bring the OEMs onboard is that we want to
test XR experiences on market-leading devices that are launched today and on
those that haven’t even launched yet,” says Costello.
“You can imagine
how valuable it would be for this OEMs to get their devices into the hands of
premier sports right owners and to get their feedback for improvement before
launch.”
They are also keen
to speak to individual teams and brands interested in XR sports
activations. “In an ideal world we would cover the entire value chain for
XR sports,” he says. “The alliance will facilitate an exchange around how to
create future businesses and how to foster development in the industry.”
The alliance has
pencilled agreements with unnamed sports federations to develop some initial
experiments. “There will be an announcement once we’re able to speak about
that publicly but we have the verbal commitment from those federations to start
working on that,” says Nguyen.
The likes of
Disney/ESPN, WarnerBros. Discovery and NBC are also being approached. “The idea
is if an individual entity is spending money on a POC, we would like to
leverage that learning from that investment across the entire alliance,” says
Somolinos.
“One of the things
that we have discovered over the past few months when we’ve been pitching this
idea to sports federations, clubs and leagues, is that normally XR is driven
internally by one single person or a very small team. Even in large organisations
XR is considered as an experiment. We feel the loneliness of these people
and how they are struggling to push internally. They are asking us individually
at HBS, Accedo and Qualcomm to help them drive that upward. This is where
collectively the alliance can step in.
“We can help them
drive [XR use cases] internally with much more muscle than what they will be
doing with their smaller experimentation and budgets.”
Nguyen calls this
“forum” for members a second mission of the alliance. “We are right now in the
recruiting phase.”
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