Sports' Move Into Streaming Strains Supply of Tech Personnel

Sports' Move Into Streaming Strains Supply of Tech Personnel Layoffs at tech companies closely aligned with sports leagues are poorly timed By Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Monday, October 16, 2023 - 7:00 am

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The glitchy launch of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's presidential campaign on Twitter in May may have been an inauspicious start to a turbulent political year, but, for some observers of the streaming sector, the event serves as a canary in the coal mine as streaming catches on in sports.

Twitter's layoffs of tech personnel foreshadowed the DeSantis debacle, which took place after more than 80% of the social-media company's workforce had been dismissed since Elon Musk acquired it last year.

In March, Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon - which is planning a standalone app for its newly acquired live sports content, including the rights to the NFL's Thursday Night Football games in the U.S., the Premier League in the UK, and the NBA in Brazil - said the company would slash 9,000 jobs, bringing total cuts since November 2021 to 27,000. Adding to the general uncertainty are potential staffing cuts at Apple, whose Apple TV+ service started this year to exclusively live-stream MLS games in a 10-year, $2.5 billion global deal, and Meta Platforms Inc., owner of Facebook, which has said pro sports leagues could benefit from its paid online events feature in the future.

In the Engine Room In short, the boiler rooms of streaming-media distributors are running with fewer and fewer engineers. Folks on the management side of streaming's deep infrastructure have taken notice.

Stack Sports' Tyler Feret: Companies will come to regret it if they don't keep enough staff to constantly maintain and scale [streaming] infrastructure.

Sports-media companies should certainly be careful about laying off too many people, especially because sports streaming skews so heavily towards live content, as opposed to a Netflix or HBO, observes Tyler Feret, GM, digital media, Stack Sports, which develops SaaS solutions that power several thousand sports organizations from scholastic to professional. Audiences are a lot more forgiving if a VOD service is down for 15 minutes than if they lose 15 minutes of a [ballgame].

Feret, who was founder and CEO of Meridix Creative, which developed HD streaming solutions for sports before being acquired this year by Sports Stack, suggests that Twitter may be an especially egregious case because Musk seems to have gutted that organization at obvious risk to the product, whereas some of the layoffs at Disney and elsewhere were explained by the companies as right-sizing' after a period of overhiring.

However, he cautions, sports-media companies shouldn't underestimate the nuances and complexity of streaming, nor the talent levels required to successfully operate a high-caliber streaming service.

Layoffs are a near-term solution to cut costs, Feret explains, but companies will come to regret it if they don't keep enough staff to constantly maintain and scale infrastructure, monitor quality of service, and test playback on the immense ecosystem of audience devices. If executives knew what really goes on to successfully stream video from point A to point B, they would see it is nothing short of magic.

Balance of People and Jobs Not everyone is as concerned. Mike Kelley, president, Grabyo, a cloud-based video-production-tools provider, considers the Twitter case unique and not necessarily a portent.

Grabyo's Mike Kelley sees opportunities for streaming-tech staffers as sports teams and leagues pursue their own streaming agendas.

I think no one is feeling great about the state of Twitter's APIs and their tech platform and their support, he observes, but I think other platforms are still pretty solid. Amazon, for sure, has sports as a major priority, and, obviously, Amazon Prime is a major priority, so I don't think that they're necessarily laying off a lot of key people on the streaming-tech side.

And any streaming-tech staffers at risk could find plenty of opportunities as sports teams and leagues pursue their own streaming agendas, Kelley contends.

Content owners are realizing that they need to invest more in personnel that can help manage some of these things internally, he explains. Even on the club level - an NBA club or an NFL club or an MLS club - I've seen them starting to staff up technology-savvy people internally, just to be able to help manage all these different platforms that they have to stream to and push content to, whether that's highlights or live feeds, the coach shows, and athlete launches, like the Messi [event] they did in Miami. Leagues in the U.S. need more talent on that side of things. I think I see a lot more opportunities on the team and league side for these platform-technology folks.

Some pro-audio manufacturers are ramping up engineering departments, in part because of streaming. According to Wheatstone spokesperson Dee McVicker, the console and IT-platform developer now has more R&D engineers on staff than even two years ago, but with different skillsets: [Streaming] and, by extension, streaming sports is moving into the mainstream, where there's so much more opportunity for reach and revenue. For most broadcasters, it doesn't really matter if you're streaming from a cloud or from a server in your [Technical Operations Center]; it's all the same tech that runs on both.

Economic Impact The SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes over the summer revealed some of the financial pressures behind streaming. The ad market is in free fall, consumers are cutting the cable cord at a dizzying rate, and launching streaming services has been enormously costly, forcing these companies to pack on billions of dollars in debt, Vari

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2023/10/16/sports-move-into-streaming-stra...
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