If you’re a sports rights holder in Asia, the sports monetization opportunities of those magical live and replay moments are huge.
The Asian Games are just one of many sports events taking place on the continent attracting a growing fan base. There are also significant fan bases for soccer, cricket, basketball, badminton, martial arts… and the list goes on.
But there are challenges.
Challenge # 1: Getting Sticky Eyeballs
It’s a highly competitive landscape. You are competing not only against other video services, but also against other forms of entertainment — gaming and social media to name two. How do you attract new eyeballs and convert them to subscribers? What’s the key to grabbing their attention when they’re busy with other things or their attention span is short?
We at Ateme love that kind of challenge. It’s not enough to simply improve or enhance what you’ve been doing so far — better quality with better images, better audio, lower latency. You need new sports monetization ideas, the kind of ideas you don’t build alone, but in collaborative innovation, with new partnerships creating new ecosystems. Something completely different that will really grab them, make them sit up, look, listen, and engage. Something unique.
That’s a tall order. But at Ateme, we’ve found a solution. We call it Fan Engagement.
Sports Monetization Opportunities with Fan Engagement
Imagine a soccer fan, busy at work and short on time. She can’t watch the whole game — but doesn’t want to miss the highlights. So, you reach out to her — only with the best parts.
That’s what our Fan Engagement solution can do.
It’s powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, trained to zero in on the magical moments: the highs of the goals; the drama of the red card. It then clips these magic moments and packages and sends them directly to the fan’s device: her smartphone if she’s traveling, her computer screen if she’s working, her connected TV if she’s watching a movie with the family.
The smart thing is, to get these push notifications, they’ll have to first download your app. Granted, that won’t immediately turn them into subscribers — they’ll probably start with your app’s free, limited version. But it’s the first step to getting them engaged, familiar with it, wanting those features they can’t get with the limited version.
But that’s just the beginning. Because Fan Engagement opens so many doors, you don’t have to limit yourself to just sending a video clip. You can add overlays where the fans click to get information about the player who scored a goal, for example. And you might even want to sell the player’s t-shirt, including eCommerce capabilities where you boost your revenues with a percentage of everything they buy. In fact, it’s much more than just delivering video. It’s gamification of video, at the crossroads of video, social media, augmented reality, and eCommerce.
And even beyond offering great experiences that engage fans and create new opportunities for monetization, it also automatically collects data, and makes that data actionable and monetizable.
Sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch?
Challenge # 2: Keeping Costs Down
The catch is the second challenge: Keeping your costs down.
Sure, it’s great to engage fans and attract new subscribers during sports events. But you’ve already spent so much money to acquire the content in the first place. And video streaming is notorious for its peaks and troughs — even more so when you’re streaming events. You can’t just invest for average viewing times and hope for the best when you have a peak. That’s a sure-fire way to disengage fans. They want high-quality video, low latency, and amazing experiences.
The nature of sports is that they are an Occasional Use (OU) game (excuse the pun). With a CapEx investment for these events, it takes a very long time to recover your investment. And while you do want to acquire new viewers, you don’t want to lose money doing so.
Creating Opportunities with SaaS
It turns out that the best way to curb hefty costs is to offer the technology through public cloud and modern micro-services software that can benefit from the full potential of cloud providers. And while you could manage the process of combining the infrastructure and software to make the required workflows, the logical solution is to turn to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). At Ateme, this would be Ateme+, which makes your platform both flexible and interoperable.
Ateme+ also means you can pay for your technical solutions hourly or through subscription. In other words, you simply eliminate CapEx expenses. The best part: Ateme+ has been designed from the ground up to support OU. We have designed it to stop and restart remembering all your configurations for those events that repeat every week. This helps keep operational and technical costs in control, while maintaining a high Quality of Experience.
So, if you get your Fan Engagement right and your SaaS right, you’re all set to grow — without any CapEx investment.
Want to find out more about how to find new sports monetization opportunities for sports rightsholders in Asia? I’ll be at SportsPro APAC in Singapore, August 1 ̵ 2, and would love to meet you there. Fill out the form below to set up a meeting.
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