LTN Arc partners with a Big 4 sports league

Major sports leagues are looking to grow relationships directly with their most passionate fans. Delivering unique versions of games to fans around the world requires managing complicated workflows, and streamlining processes is critical to enable rights owners to monetize their content. That means leagues need to create more versions for more audiences, but also mitigate costs and drive revenue in new ways. With LTN Arc, one league is doing just that.

Overview

LTN works with many of the major sports leagues, which leverage our global scale to reach fans around the world. Our longstanding relationship with one Big 4 league led them to choose our cutting-edge Arc platform to help them scale their app into new markets. We’ve produced more than 3,800 ultra-personalized game feeds, while keeping costs down.

Challenge

The league wanted to cost-effectively increase its distribution agreements and business development deals in smaller regions of the world. In the past, in order to do so, they needed to utilize satellite relays, which was cost prohibitive due to the expensive nature of signal relay and because small markets had to carry the full cost of signal distribution.

Creating these hyper-localized feeds requires detailed graphic regionalization in order to provide content that fits each audience’s expectations. In addition, the league needed to merge pregame and postgame shows from local broadcast partners with the live game itself in order to deliver one seamless product to subscribers.

The league needed to horizontally scale its workflows to get customized feeds to all of its distribution partners, but doing so was putting pressure on their operations center. They needed an efficient and cost-effective solution that would allow them to not only realize more revenue from existing partnerships, but to offer deals with lower revenue requirements to potential international partners.

The league faced a choice: Do we build our own infrastructure? Do we expand our staff? Do we go to a third party? Are there other ways to version games and get them into our digital application?

Solution

The state-of-the-art Arc platform offered all the capabilities the league needed, and then some. To create hyper-localized feeds, Arc ingests both data and video feeds from the league and its partners, determines when to insert various regional content into breaks, such as commentary or replays, inserts ad triggers, then sends back multiple versions for digital distribution.

Arc can also ingest large amounts of existing metadata — data and information about the game itself — then embed additional triggers based on that source data to enable downstream workflows and processing. Arc is built on the LTN Network, the industry’s only fully managed global IP network, which provides a foundation for acquisition, workflow processing, and data discovery about each feed.

Automated marker insertion also plays a key role in merging pregame and postgame content with the live game. The Arc platform ingests the pregame, adds triggers and content into the breaks, then switches from studio input to game input. The same process is followed for the postgame, in reverse, switching from game input to studio input and adding triggers and content. Once it’s all stitched together, we’ve created a completely new version of the primary game feed for the app.

Result

With LTN, the cost of signal distribution is significantly reduced, allowing leagues to not only do bespoke distribution deals in smaller markets, but also deliver ultra-personalized experiences at a fraction of the cost. The ability to deliver custom content to any screen, in any location, allows it to reach into new markets, build direct relationships with its fans, and incrementally grow league revenue without a significant increase in cost.

Arc also empowers downstream automation workflows that create operational efficiencies and provide the ability to scale, without the challenges and costs that come with adding staff and infrastructure. With this lowered cost structure, the league is more competitive in the marketplace. Where traditionally they would have had to command a very high level of revenue from each endpoint in order to cover their costs — especially for such a high level of customized feeds — they now have more flexibility when it comes to distribution and licensing deals.

Ultimately, this Big 4 sports league experienced what the Arc platform does best: expanding reach and growing revenue opportunities by efficiently versioning high-quality, global game feeds. This fully managed service is built for large-scale ingest, aggregation, normalization, and monitoring of even the most complex input and output feeds. Contact us for a demo today to see how we can help your league get results like this.