Sports broadcasters can boost viewing times by 25-30% thanks to interactive graphical overlays that enrich a live event with team line-ups, match and player statistics, instant video highlights, polls, quizzes, leaderboards and more. This boosts the opportunity to monetize viewers through in-stream advertising and also new ad inventory created by the overlays. The engagement figures come from Kjetil Horneland, CEO at Ease Live, the Evertz company that lists YES Network (the leading U.S. regional sports network), French broadcaster M6 and Austrian broadcaster Servus TV among its customers.
According to Horneland, up to 70% of viewers will answer a poll question about an incident in a sports event. Within months of launch, one customer was reporting a 38% increase in the average streams per game for their sports offer. He says the typical increase in streams per live event is in the 30% range – suggesting that viewers find the coverage more compelling with overlays.
There is a possibility that interactive graphical overlays will be treated as a new category of rights, which would confirm their value. Horneland points to the partnership between Ease Live, Play Anywhere and LALIGA, the Spanish football league, as an early indication that the market could move in this direction.
LALIGA first provided viewers with integrated interactive capabilities through LALIGA+, its multi-device streaming platform and app. It has since formed a partnership with Play Anywhere, which provides an AI fintech platform that includes a compliance engine, a clearinghouse and a data analytics platform to support a new breed of Interactive Rights agreements, with transparency to all stakeholders. This rights model can be applied to sport or other unscripted content.
LALIGA and Play Anywhere’s Interactive Rights agreement unlocks the possibility for LALIGA’s broadcast and streaming partners to themselves deliver interactive contextual content with their coverage. LALIGA’s rightsholders get full transparency on their rights. There is also a clear view of revenue allocation and disbursement throughout the LALIGA distribution ecosystem.
Last week there was further evidence of this rights innovation when ATP Media, the global media and distribution arm of the ATP Tour, announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Play Anywhere that makes the rights specialist the exclusive provider of contextual and monetizable interactive experiences across all of ATP Media’s broadcast and streaming distribution worldwide.
Play Anywhere will provide a system that includes Ease Live’s front-end interactive graphics engine, with interactive experiences powered by official data from Tennis Data Innovations. This will be offered to ATP Media’s worldwide broadcast partners and launched via its direct-to-consumer streaming service, Tennis TV, across both linear and digital distribution.
“We are honoured to partner with ATP Media to bring enhanced consumer experiences to viewers while ensuring that all parties in the value chain are remunerated, helping to expand the ‘Play Anywhere Ecosystem’ as a global standard,” comments Yaacov Ben-Yaacov, CEO of Play Anywhere.
LALIGA has confirmed the impact interactive graphical overlays have on the UX. 30% of viewers have interacted with its content when given the chance, and viewing times are up 25%, the league owner reports. The graphical overlay user experience, the new rights arrangement and the business opportunities these create earned Ease Live, LALIGA and Play Anywhere a 2024 IBC Innovation Award in the Content Everywhere category for the LALIGA global interactive deployment.
Jorge de la Vega, Executive General Director at LALIGA, says: “By integrating interactive content into our broadcasts and OTT streams, we can offer fans a richer, more immersive experience that extends viewing times and boosts interaction. This, in turn, enhances the value of our media rights by creating new avenues for monetization.”
Horneland said of the award: “Together with LALIGA and Play Anywhere, we have demonstrated that interactive experiences can transform the viewing experience while delivering significant value to broadcasters and advertisers.”
The Ease Live technology generates the HTML5 graphics overlays in the cloud and these are streamed to the user device, where they are rendered and synchronized with the video feed. The graphics overlay the video stream in the player, with Horneland referring to the graphics layer as an invisible browser. A simple SDK enables the solution to be integrated into existing video players deployed by content owners in their apps.
The interactive graphics platform integrates seamlessly with existing broadcast and sports data workflows.
A demonstration at IBC showed motor racing, with a driver cam appearing in the bottom corner of the main feed. This box could be expanded or could even take over the whole screen, and itself can contain a graphics overlay. The ‘picture-in-picture’ overlay could be game highlights for someone that is joining late.
The advertising opportunities are non-interruptive, like L-banners that wrap around the video feed or simple sponsor logos that sit at the top of a live statistics box. Because this is new inventory and the ads are non-interruptive, it represents an opportunity for additional monetization. A key moments recap feed, presented as an overlay box, could be sponsored, for example. It is possible to introduce affiliate links that lead to ecommerce, and betting information is a natural partnership opportunity.
The interactive overlays can be used as a first screen or a second screen experience. While most of the use-cases for the Ease Live overlays are in sport today, Horneland confirms that this technology could be applied to game shows and news, or other programming genres.
Other Ease Live customers include Austrian broadcaster Servus TV, a Red Bull Mediahouse company, which used graphical overlays for TV and mobile for coverage of the UEFA EURO 2024 tournament this summer. Servus TV reports that 62% of the audience interacted with the content, and 56% of viewers responded to polls presented on-stream during the games. On mobile screens, 60% viewed team line-ups and 54% viewed season stats multiple times.
In June, Ease Live announced a collaboration with streaming tech company Bedrock to take the interactive overlays to media and entertainment companies in Europe. The first outcome was the use of overlays for UEFA EURO 2024 coverage on M6+, the free streaming service from France’s Groupe M6. The overlays were possible on Android TV, Apple iOS and Android mobile devices. The feature will be made available later this year to more device platforms including Samsung, LG, Hisense, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.
A long-standing customer is Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network (YES Network), which has regional media rights to the New York Yankees baseball and Brooklyn Nets basketball teams, among others.
Horneland concludes: “We believe the scalability we’ve demonstrated, combined with the increase in fan engagement and the potential for new advertising initiatives, is a gamechanger for live sports video rights holders.”
Top photo shows ATP tennis with Ease Live graphical overlays.
