Broadcast Disruptors

On Tuesday we were at Sky Studios in Osterley, fantastic location and interior design if you like huge spaces, for the Broadcast Disruptors Leaders event.

I grabbed a great quote from Richard Scudamore (Premier League) that referring to the transition from free-to-air to Pay TV in the 90s said:

“It was tough at start … but we stuck with it and look at what we have now”.

I guess we should do the same with OTT.

It was nice to notice like almost all previous sessions had a Deltatre’s client involved, ATP, HBS, Premier League, etc.. I moderated a short but energetic panel on “The Solution-Finders: Overcoming OTT Challenges”, with Ralph Rivera from Discovery/Eurosport and Marina Storti from Now TV.

Two Italians and an American from the Bronx, a dangerous mix: Ralph coming from a successful first with the Winter Olympic Games on the Eurosport platform with great audience numbers, Marina managing the sophisticated challenges of the young free Sky alternative of the more traditional Pay TV offering.

We got a lot of attention even on the broader media for sports going OTT, not all positive at times, comparing the simplicity of traditional broadcast TV with the intricacies of internet-based services. On the other hand, users love being able to access content anytime anywhere, they demand it, at a level where they will not be able to go back.

I see a very important silver lining in this: sports OTT is going mainstream. I mean, even in countries that are less developed on the digital side, like Italy, the ones that define a nation are going OTT. It’s a sign we matter.

Highlights of the session which I will bring home with me are: Marina’s statement that for OTT “engagement is deeply correlated with retention and the path to immediate watch is critical for success”; Ralph sharing how Eurosport biggest learning was “how to approach and successfully manage the direct-to-consumer relationships in all its aspects”. Noy  the complexity of the OTT supply chain needs a company culture that prepares for failures and is ready to act promptly.

Leaders at Chelsea’s

On Wednesday, I was on stage again for the session we sponsored as Deltatre named “OTT vs Linear: Identifying New Global Opportunities”.

That was the last panel of the day and the fact that a full room (and that room is huge) was engaged for 40 mins is a great testimony of how the OTT subject is front and center in people’s mind.

Linear vs OTT and the evolution of how sports properties and media company approach this in a global market, from sell-and-forget to a multi-layer set of relationships and partnerships that need constant engagement.

Ipsita Dasgupta from Star India International, Joris Evers from La Liga and Richard Young from Eleven Networks shared their stories and their approach to OTT from three distinct points of view.

As I was in the UK, with Eleven and La Liga I could not resist but spice up a bit the start of the panel by asking the question that everybody wanted to ask: “What’s going on at 3pm on Saturdays?”. Richard explained how they believe the rule that forbids to have football shown on “TV” to protect stadium attendance is obsolete and them, with La Liga blessing, want to fight that.

Here are some highlights from the panel.

Joris

“La Liga sees the OTT scenario as a great opportunity for a League that wants to grow internationally, aggressively I would add, as it offers a multiplication of available platforms and partners in the various territories. He expanded on how La Liga’s approach to media partners is based on a continuous engagement to build and grow the audience together harmonizing marketing efforts for a common goal.”

Richard

“Eleven is moving from an initial strategy of buying premium rights in second tier countries like Poland to a more aggressive approach like in the UK, where they now have La Liga and Serie A rights amongst others. With an OTT first approach but open to pragmatically find multiple platforms to partner with their linear channels.”

Ipsita

“The fascinating challenge of serving the Indian diaspora of 30M people, plus Pakistan and Bangladesh, worldwide with content that matters. Guess what, that’s cricket, so considering also all cricket fans in countries like the UK. Growing the audience through OTT has the advantage that the data coming from the direct-to-consumers relationship inform the marketing and product efforts. She also told us how Kabbadi, a mostly unknown sport in Europe for which she is in charge of the League in India, is watched by more than 300M people in India, a true passion.”

Next Stop Sportel Monaco then Sports OTT Summit in Madrid. Stay tuned!

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The prestigious prize was assigned to TennisTV, the OTT platform developed by Deltatre and launched in November 2016 to provide the ultimate tennis streaming service. TennisTV delivers over 2000 live ATP World Tour matches a year with on-demand content at the highest quality across 11 platforms.

The past 12 months have seen the platform continue to implement a number of new features, including the release of a dedicated app for PlayStation 4. A new channel, named “Rivalries”, was recently launched to surface more of the depth in archive content to reach broader audiences.

Giampiero Rinaudo, Deltatre’s CEO, stated: “We are really delighted whenever our customers win sports awards, which is happening often lately. We are extremely happy for ATP and TennisTV, and their digital team. Yet another award that rewards the courage and forward-looking vision of one of the most advanced sports OTT offers in the market, worldwide.”

Congratulations, ATP Media!

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De Marchis will be discussing tech challenges typical of the OTT world on a panel titled “The Solution-Finders: overcoming OTT tech challenges”, set to take part on Tuesday, 9 October, at Sky Studios, as part of The Broadcast Disruptors event. The lineup of speakers includes Ralph Rivera, Managing Director at Eurosport Digital, and Marina Storti, Now TV’s Director of Strategy and Propositions.

On Wednesday, 10 October, Chelsea FC’s headquarters will be the theatre of the second day of appointments, as part of the Sport Business Summit. Carlo De Marchis will be chairing and moderating a panel on the Strategy Stage, titled “OTT vs Linear: Identifying New Global Opportunities”.

Joris Evers (Chief Communications Officer at LaLiga), Ipsita Dasgupta (President, Strategy and New Ventures at Star India), and Richard Young (Commercial Director at Eleven Sports) will discuss the current status of relationships between broadcasters and right holders.

Further insights will emerge from a focus on building audiences in different markets and on how rights holders and media companies can effectively work together in an era dominated by streaming services.

Click here for the full Leaders Week London 2018 agenda.

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Did a successful company ever shout less loudly about itself than Deltatre, the Bruin Sports Capital-owned international sports media services company? – wonders Sporcal’s interviewer.

Speak to the personable and affable Giampiero Rinaudo, the company’s chief executive and one of its three founders (hence its name), and he’ll tell you that it has been involved in broadcasting six of the 10 most-viewed TV sporting events of all time (matches from the Fifa World Cup and Uefa European Championships, a Uefa Champions League final, the 100 metres at the Rio Olympics, an India-Pakistan test match and an NFL Super Bowl, for the record).

Who knew? Certainly not the average TV viewer, who is unlikely to find so much as a mention of Deltatre in the closing credits of one of those milestone TV broadcasts, to acknowledge the company’s crucial role in delivering it to his or her screen.

“We’re probably the leading company in the world [in the field], but very few people know what we’re doing and at which scale,” Rinaudo himself happily agrees.

“Every year is a record year for the company, in the sense that we continue to grow the business. – Giampiero says when asked about 2018, a new year of great achievements for Deltatre – This year we had the World Cup, the Asian Games, the Olympic Channel, PyeongChang and important wins in America, including the major league win. But we’re looking forward to better in 2019.”

On major sports events

Deltatre’s work with the Asian Games in Indonesia this summer, at which its main role was to deliver the website, mobile apps and real-time results, represented something of a landmark. “It’s impressive how big the games are – the second biggest in the world,” Rinaudo says. “For us it was important because we’re pushing hard to develop our business in Asia, and it brought a lot of visibility. We were impressed because 90 per cent of the [digital] content consumption was on mobile. Because we are one of the few companies that are really global, we can see that the way people consume sport in various continents is different.”

On sports data gathering

In 2016, Deltatre entered into a match data collection and provision partnership with Sportcast, a subsidiary of the DFL, Germany’s professional soccer league, creating a separate company, Sportec Solutions, to handle “the collection, administration, quality management and provision of official match data on Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 encounters as well as the relegation and Supercup.”

What kind of data has Deltatre identified as having value, Murray asks?

“In football, we’re talking about stats about players, tracking of players, historical data,” Rinaudo replies. “It’s a matter of how you show this data. What do I do with this data? Live, it’s very difficult to make use of, because you need to tell a story and you can’t pause the action for five seconds to show the data during a live event.

“But you have to remember that every match has two or three hours of post-game show, where there is increasing use of this data, using augmented reality. It can be done fast, because we know the position of every player in every frame, and you can use it to explain tactical movement. We’re also working hard on what can be done with data on artificial intelligence. The nice thing is that it’s able to recognise patterns that you don’t recognise as a human being. In 1,000 matches, there are recurrent patterns that can bring out information. For example, in rugby we might be able now to predict when it’s time to replace a player. We’re accumulating a lot of data and part of the job is to understand how best to use it.”

Asked to identify the main opportunities for the company in the next five years, Rinaudo is quick to seize on over-the-top delivery of sport, which, he says, is causing “quite a disruption in the market for how rights are sold. That’s a great growth opportunity. Graphics seemed to have hit some sort of plateau, but with data, AR and VR, graphics is still a very profitable market for us. Almost all sectors are still growing.”

On the development of OTT and future opportunities

Deltatre’s development of OTT tools could be equally applicable to entertainment companies and programming, and Rinaudo says that some such companies have approached Deltatre, saying: “You sold us the most difficult thing, which is live. But we also have a kids’ channel, a movie channel: can you help us with those?”

“It’s something we’re considering,” Rinaudo says. “Our OTT and streaming work is only sport at the moment.” And yet, he continues, while “we are technically a very good company, there are many good technology companies. Our differentiator is that we know sport and how to apply technology to sport.”

“OTT will become the main vehicle in not too much time. Live, there is still a 30-to-40-seconds delay. What does ‘absolutely solid’ mean? When broadcasting started there were probably signal glitches, problems with the solidity of the technology. Of course, people are right to complain; when they pay for the service, they should get the service. But most of OTT is working well. In less than five years the problems will be resolved. Demand creates investment. Don’t forget that until five years ago not many households had the bandwidth to watch Netflix at home.”

Read the full interview here.

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Deltatre employees took part in a full day of activities and football, basketball and volleyball tournaments, sharing the “stage” with 150 athletes coming from several areas of Piemonte Region. It was a great day, in the name of sport and the values that resonate with the mission of Special Olympics.

“I am often facing the theme of Corporate Social Responsibility, – explained Chiara Greco, Deltatre CHRO – in order to build a team of people who not only are colleagues, but in most cases also friends. I wanted to go beyond the usual ‘team building’ activities, and through some Google searches, I came across Special Olympics. Needless to say, it was love at first sight, and we started creating and organising this event together. Special Olympics’ values are fully in line with ours as a company and I would be happy to develop more initiatives together in the next future”.

Regional delegate for Special Olympics, Charlie Cremonte, also stated: “It was an honour to be contacted by Deltatre, an organisation so well established in our territory and all over the world. Hard work always pays off, and we are looking forward to starting a long-lasting collaboration, after such a brilliant event”.

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Our Company cares deeply about our social responsibility programmes and this initiative in particular embodies the values that are core in our global organization: embracing team spirit and creating a better world by fostering the acceptance and inclusion of all people in all aspects of life; on the playing field and in life both in and out of the office.

Special Olympics’ unified sports put the spotlight on athletes with or without an intellective disability, as well as able-bodied partners. Deltatre will be at the forefront, in the name of team building, sport, and inclusion, for the organization of a day that will fully reflect the mission of Special Olympics.

Ten sports associations with 150 athletes from several areas of Piemonte, will meet our employees at Turin’s CH4 Sporting Club, and together take part in three tournaments for unified sports: football, volleyball, and basketball.

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The project Eurosport Cube was selected as the most impactful of the year for the category “Content Creation”. Developed for the Winter Olympics, Eurosport Cube is an immersive mixed reality studio that creates a fully interactive environment to analyse the action, built entirely out of LED display technology and using augmented and virtual reality.

Read here for more insight.

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IBC is the one global forum where every aspect of the industry comes together to share knowledge, solve challenges and develop future strategies. The IBC Innovation Awards celebrate that spirit of co-operation and collaboration.

Read more on IBC Awards here.

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We provided the full spectrum of Deltatre sports services platform from digital to OTT to broadcast graphics and official data to clients on both sides of the rights equation: rights owners and rights holders, sports properties and media companies.

Billions of fans have already experienced and are experiencing sports on Deltatre’s provided solutions; records have been broken, and awards have been won by our clients.

At the core of all this and enabling our creative and operational capabilities – says De Marchis – are three Deltatre products: Diva, Forge and Magma. On the back of these successful deliveries, we would like to make these products available to a wider market as they have been successfully stress-tested for the most demanding event on the planet.

We are now announcing new versions for all three product lines:
1. Diva 4.3 — Our video platform latest version, the best beyond-tv experience available on the market at the heart of our OTT solution;
2. Forge 2018.3 — Our sport-specific CMS for web & apps, state-of-art editorial back-office completely re-written but based on 20 years experience with the most visited websites in sports;
3. Magma Engine 1.1 — Our new revolutionary Unity-based graphic and AR/VR engine, delivering amazing results with an interesting pricing model.

A new sports season is around the corner, we are keen to present our most interesting case histories and, in the meantime, talk to us if you want to know more, at info@deltatre.it.

Read the full article here.

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The Asian Games are one of the biggest multisport events in the world, second only to the Summer Olympics, and are expected to attract the attention of billions of people around the globe. The 18th edition, jointly hosted by Indonesian cities Jakarta and Palembang, includes 40 Sports, 58 Disciplines, 499 medal events and sees the participation of 12,492 athletes from 46 Countries.

Deltatre has worked to build best-in-class website – click here – and mobile apps, powered by award-winning Multisport Platform, Forge. All the solutions delivered were customised to include sports that are traditional to Asian culture in particular, such as Sepak Takraw, Pencak Silat, Wushu and Kabaddi.

“A great atmosphere accompanied the opening ceremony – says Stefano Rigat, President EMEA, from Jakarta – It showed how passionate and proud these countries are about the Asian Games. We are also proud to be a Supporting Sponsor. This marks Deltatre’s first sponsorship of a global sports competition and represents a challenging opportunity to work with INASCOG and other stakeholders on an event that will reach more fans than ever”.

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