We have seen an abundance of live streams available to watch Wimbledon for several years. Take Virgin Media for instance – the broadcast channel surprised everyone in 2019 by announcing that it would be offering its customers access to all of the big matches on Centre Court in 4K with HDR.

This was a strategic move for Virgin Media, by timing it around one of the flagship sporting events of the year it helped to increase subscriptions and provide its customers with a high-quality viewing experience. Meaning that the broadcaster remains relevant and a viable option and platform for people to enjoy major sporting events, creating a competitive edge against its market competitors.
 

Content supply chain control

Wimbledon had predicted the rise in new technologies a couple of years ago and set up its own broadcast division to future-proof its control over technology, content, and engagement.

In the past, Wimbledon’s broadcasting rights was outsourced to the BBC; The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), Wimbledon’s organizer, had limited access and control over The Championship’s content. It was therefore an obvious decision, in 2017, for AELTC to announce that Wimbledon Broadcasting Services (WBS) will have full ownership of the TV cameras and broadcast output internationally. This was a sports industry trend at the time, rights holders demanded greater control over their content supply chain. Tennis Australia was a pioneer in bringing TV production in-house for the Australian Open two years earlier.

AELTC now oversees its individual stakes and audience engagement in-house, building on its existing stakeholder relationships (whilst staying friends with the BBC) and exploring new revenue streams.

The BBC still maintains exclusive rights to Wimbledon’s broadcast in the UK, but it will no longer have any say on production costs. The Championships is now capable of maximizing on its wealth of legacy content, in addition to new and archived material – an average of three matches per court, each day, video from matches can add up to hundreds of hours of footage. The audience will now benefit from added choice, access to a broader range of content, and ultimately an enhanced user experience across different platforms.
 

A platform for monetization

Enter the Ooyala Flex Media Platform, a technology solution that helps its customers future-proof their own levels of control. Whether it’s an existing or new piece of technology that needs integrating into the ecosystem, content retrieval from several sources, or delivering media to more endpoints – the Ooyala Flex Media Platform empowers them to do this, and more.

OoyalaMAM enables organizations to manage, search, edit and deliver to multiple destinations; helping them unlock previously untapped opportunities. Once you have full visibility of your content catalog, and how to source it quickly and efficiently, the ability to monetize becomes massive.

Today, the Ooyala Flex Media Platform is helping multiple sports organizations such as Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB), National Rugby League (NRL), and many more to do exactly this – help take control of their own destiny and have that direct engagement with their fans.
 

The need for speed (and AI)

Going back to the focus on efficiency and speed… AI has helped AELTC to successfully streamline its content supply chain in a time- and cost-efficient manner. It not only localizes content for the UK market, but also creates and distributes a significant number of original videos for different markets – delivering an all-round excellent user experience. Organizers will also find additional revenue coming-in from sponsors and global broadcast partners, who now have an augmented library of content to engage with fans.

The Ooyala Flex Media Platform, together with Dalet Media Cortex, now provides AI-driven workflows to automatically associate that metadata against the correct content. This hands back valuable time to customers in both financial and delivery terms. Once the metadata has been automatically indexed with Dalet Media Cortex, you can then go into OoyalaMAM and review the metadata and manually add, change, and delete anything that needs that last adjustment from a human intervention. The ability to marry automation and manual workflows gives sports rights holders and distributors a powerful metadata enrichment engine, and allows them to be reassured that their metadata is being correctly inserted.

The secret to optimizing speed and efficiency in a content supply chain is to harmonize and manage all its components, making it as flexible and organic as possible. Although this is not an easy feat as Wimbledon and its technology partners have been developing their strategy to improve  global fan engagement for 30 years!

Want to discuss your video strategy to wow fans and build a future-proof sports media platform? Contact us today.

Bea Alonso  Director of Product Marketing at Dalet