How to win in the era of live fan engagement
Live fan engagement has evolved rapidly over the past two years. From make-shift home studios and live fan feeds shot on smartphones to fans interacting digitally, virtual fan engagement gave broadcasts the ‘live audience feel’ when in-person fan attendance was postponed. Today, live audiences are back and live fan engagement is evolving to bring new content experiences and monetization opportunities.
Social media platforms changed the playing field, delivering instant, unfiltered, user-generated content right from the field of play. To compete head-on with social media and win back eyeballs, broadcasters need to re-engage fans. Live fan engagement is a critical competitive differentiator for media organizations to stand out from the crowd and capitalize on new revenue streams such as addressable advertising, sports wagering, etc.
Live fan engagement requires strategizing and planning but doesn’t need to be complex. The right technology and managed services partner can ensure the deployment runs seamlessly, end-to-end.
Live fan engagement requires strategizing and planning but doesn’t need to be complex. The right technology and managed services partner can ensure the deployment runs seamlessly, end-to-end.
The different live fan engagement strands
In the most recent Summer and Winter Olympics, most of us saw athletes celebrating medals virtually with loved ones back at home or fans taking part in virtual ‘watch together’ parties. However, depending on the use case, live fan engagement can take different forms.
Interactive advertising and polling
Interactive advertising and polling require a direct response from fans. For example, during Super Bowl LVI, an advertiser served an interactive ad to US fans encouraging them to use their smartphones to scan a QR code on the screen. The brand used the ad to drive traffic to a cryptocurrency exchange website, which crashed because it couldn’t handle the surge in consumer traffic. This interactive ad is an excellent example of why planning for fan engagement across the entire lifecycle is essential. Planning should include everything from providing the right platforms to audiences and ensuring they can contribute to live linear broadcasts to companies preparing to manage fan engagement spikes.
Bringing live fan feeds into primary broadcasts
Enabling fans to become part of a live broadcast isn’t new. Live fan contribution is becoming more straightforward and faster. For example, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics broadcast relied heavily on integrating live fan feeds to compensate for the lack of at-venue audiences.
Fan engagement and secondary content and platforms
Secondary content and platform open up new possibilities for fans to actively engage with a different application or platform in parallel to the linear broadcast. For example, fans can interact on a broadcaster’s application while watching a linear news broadcast. It can also take the form of live sports betting, where fans place bets in real-time, engaging with live sports content creating ‘watch together’ and ‘bet together’ social communities. In addition, several major live sports events are being made available and produced uniquely for social media platforms. A recent example of this is the 2022 NBA Playoffs on Twitter.
The innovation driving live fan engagement
Live streaming is becoming ubiquitous. Media companies and content creators can stream from any device. Similarly, viewers consume content across devices. Media companies need to take advantage of the live streaming boom with the right technology.
While acquiring live fan feeds from different locations seems straightforward in today’s world of fast connectivity and intelligent video sharing tools, integrating these live feeds into live productions can prove challenging. Media companies need a scalable live video router solution that aggregates and ingests multiple feeds from different locations and delivers them to the right platforms securely and with ultra-low latency.
Ultra-low latency, in particular, plays a crucial role in delivering live feeds to various platforms accurately. Ultra-low latency is critical for delivering compelling, interactive viewing experiences and enabling use cases like sports betting. Latency hinders the monetization potential, including sports betting and micro-betting opportunities. To overcome the latency challenge, media companies need to leverage the power of a reliable IP multicast transmission network that forms the backbone of live streaming.
ATSC 3.0, the all-IP transmission standard, is also powering growing interactivity, including addressable advertising and hyper-localization that increases engagement as fans consume the most relevant content. Live fan engagement is also becoming ‘smarter’ through cognitive technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). AI and ML can quickly filter through hundreds of thousands of live content hours in real-time, delivering rich metadata, including location and speaker tags, voice to text, etc. AI and ML simplify workflows and enable media companies to identify the feeds they want to leverage quicker and easier.
Finally, a powerful ad signaling platform creates data bridges that enable all parts of the fragmented advertising ecosystem to communicate and share critical information, from playout automation traffic to ad decisioning systems. In this way, the right systems receive information about when the ad break starts and finishes and the types of ads coming up, enabling addressable advertising to run seamlessly.
Media companies need to take advantage of the live streaming boom with the right technology.
Live fan engagement: The ‘secret sauce’ to differentiation
Driven by innovation, live fan engagement is becoming more compelling and enables media companies to recapture audience attention with hyper-targeted and interactive content across all genres. Cloud routing solutions managing disparate live feeds from locations around the world are revolutionizing live broadcasts, as are IP transmission networks that enable the secure, reliable, and low latency delivery of feeds and ad signaling solutions that power valuable and unique advertising opportunities.
The right technology partner can provide media companies with the tech stack and managed services to bring live fan engagement and interactivity to life and drive competitive advantage. Now is the right time for media companies to rethink their live fan engagement strategy.
The right technology partner can provide media companies with the tech stack and managed services to bring live fan engagement and interactivity to life and drive competitive advantage. Now is the right time for media companies to rethink their live fan engagement strategy.