Forced Innovation and Rapid Change: John Honeycutt on the New Era of Sports Broadcasting

Forced innovation and rapid change: John Honeycutt on the new era of sports broadcasting By Adrian Pennington

Monday, August 17, 2020 - 09:24

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John Honeycutt

Televised sports have changed more in the last six months than they have ever done before, declares John Honeycutt. Rule changes, presentation changes and physical environment changes have been forced on teams and broadcasters on a scale never seen before. The fundamental question going forward is how does the product morph as a result of all this innovation?

Honeycutt is one of the industry's foremost thought leaders. After 15 years at Discovery Networks International as COO and CTO of Discovery Communications, during which he led the company's move to virtualise its infrastructure with cloud-based playout - where it was considered the first broadcaster to do so at scale - Honeycutt joined Google to establish and implement Google Cloud's initial product and go-to-market strategy for media and entertainment, telco and gaming.

Currently on sabbatical to, recharge the batteries, he has been far from idle. Aside from working with mergers and acquisitions (M&E) companies as strategic advisor through his own consultancy, The Sandy Valley Group, Honeycutt recently became a non-exec director and member of the board at Blackbird.

SVG Europe sat down with Honeycutt to hear his thoughts on the status and trajectory of the industry.

For me professionally, I've been sitting on the sidelines during the pandemic, he says. I know it's tough everyday in senior media technology roles, never mind with all of this. I have a lot of respect and admiration for my friends and colleagues who are going through this. By all accounts it is extremely challenging, frustrating, scary and - when you take a perspective -even irrelevant in the grand scheme of things in terms of your family and friends being sick.

Presentation changes

Honeycutt had time to consider the impact of behind-closed doors changes to which live events have had to adapt.

When we really start to think about the future of how we cover sports and entertainment, including large scale shiny floor competition shows, I'm not sensing a huge rush toward 50,000 people getting back to a stadium in the short term at least. So that means the product is different.

A prime is example is the NBA [detailed by SVG here] where presentation is fundamentally different to that pre-COVID. The teams are playing in a bubble in Orlando with a specially built arena featuring two giant LED walls displaying a virtual audience. Similarly, the MLB are mapping virtual audiences into seats in the stadium on certain cameras.

You could take that to its conclusion and begin to sell a totally separate ticket for a digital experience versus an in-stadium experience, suggests Honeycutt.

You could present the product on various media types differently to how you would do so in the stadium. Both commercial and social media opportunities are already being implemented. The use of virtual ads has exploded across multiple sports. The opportunity for personalisation and custom views has been on the horizon for a bit, maybe this is the moment.

As a CTO in a media company today, if you are not creating an environment that actively encourages risk taking and letting people know you are going to be there with them through this, then you are not doing your job

Marry all of this with real time social broadcasting' which platforms like Twitch are leading, and you will drive new opportunities for each of the different layers of distribution; telco, cable and online disrupters like DAZN.

He says: The point is that there has been a forced innovation to use these technologies for the first time at large scale for national consumption rather than for niche experiments. It should force us to think very carefully about how the product is presented visually. Don't just make it an overlay or a second screen. Simulated crowd sounds don't work for me either - if we're not careful it becomes like adding canned laughter to a 70s sitcom. After we get through this, we will continue to present the product in a different way versus pre-COVID.

Honeycutt points to the convergence of the digital and the physical as a direction to the future of sports presentation. There will never be anything that replaces that moment of standing in a stadium, everybody in it together, celebrating when your team does something spectacular but at the same time you cannot ignore the virtual engagement with live. It's something that younger sports fans simply expect. The communication that happens on a platform like Twitch is incredible. These codes and mediations that take place between pro gamers and fans is fascinating and is akin to having the referee and players miked up on a football field.

So how do both of these things come together across various sports? It challenges how we think about presentation.

There is no single ingredient, he insists. I believe you need the traditional mix of technical enhancements like UHD, wider colour and immersive sound and larger displays, combined with social and layers of data, tracking and virtual views, plus rule changes in sport such as VAR or segment racing in Nascar.

Then you add betting. The PGA Tour just signed a multi-year content and marketing deal that makes BetMGM an official betting operator of the PGA Tour. He comments, I'm neither an advocate nor a critic, I'm just stating a fact that betting has a huge role to play as hook into the storytelling of sport. It's just one more ingredient for engagement that cannot be ignored.

Cloud accelerant

All of this change is happening at a moment when we were all teetering on the edge of mass innovation in terms of cloud adoption and advanced analytics and advanced

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