Second screens will deliver communal experience around live

There are two main drivers in the world of sports broadcasting which will leap into the public consciousness over the next 18 months with the next round of international sports extravaganzas.

To an extent the technologies involved are at extremes to each other. On the one hand there is Ultra HD, for which sports is considered the key genre for broadcasters to attract subscribers to a new premium service.

Russia may be first out of the blocks when NTV+ airs 4K coverage of the Sochi Winter Olympics in March. The transmission would go to public viewing areas and cinemas. FIFA will follow suit in July with its planned capture of the World Cup Final. Both made headline news on announcement at IBC2013. Bandwidth and satellite capacity will be stretched in the foreseeable future to deliver 4K picture experiences to the home.

On the other hand, there is the need by broadcasters to feed consumer expectations, in a post 2012 Olympics world, to view more and more action live action on-demand on their connected TVs, PCs, mobiles and tablets.

Second screening heralds potentially the most revolutionary change in broadcasting since multi-camera coverage, since it promises to break the single, linear, directed view of a game into individually directed experiences. But perhaps also new communal experiences too.

Francis Tellier, CEO at FIFAs host broadcaster HBS told IBC delegates; We were ready for second screen for the [Germany World Cup] 2006 though it was not called that then and by [South Africa] 2010 we were already producing great content in great quantity to service bespoke broadcast requirements.

In Brazil, for the first time, football fans will be able to choose their perspectives. There will be an interactive camera plan that allows viewers to switch between an ultramotion and a Steadicam.

HBS turnkey solutions include a white label Apps and Broadcast Player that will allow viewers to pick their own feeds, live pause, and request extra data in real time.

UK broadcaster BSkyB is introducing more and more second screen video for its subscribers but the Head of Mobile Platform, Sky Sports Digital Media, Tim Orme, noted at IBC that useage was changing.

It used to be match or game focused, but we are seeing a huge amount of second screen activity between other users such as comments and reactions in order to get closer to their favourite sport.

The shared experience is often held up as the main emotional driver behind broadcast events watched live on TV, but the broadcasters and sports franchises are aiming to build connectivity using social media between individual second screen viewers.

During the Olympics, 1 million viewers watched Bradley Wiggins win a gold model online, but 999,999 probably thought they were watching it on their own, observed BBC Head of Sport Ben Gallop at IBC. During the Brazil World Cup we will definately do more to make the moment shared, more social, more connected.

Half of the whole UK adult population used the BBC Sport website during London 2012 and had 24 streams online to watch any even live. A year on and that is now a hygiene factor, they expect it to be delivered, said Gallop.

The challenge for any broadcaster is how you keep technology moving on in a meaningful way for the audience, and not doing it for technologys sake.

Not everything was successful, he revealed. Maybe there was too much data as overlays on the screen, and some of our full video player wasnt available on mobile. We will take those lessons onboard when we look at 2014. We have our annual staples, like Wimbledon and Open Golf, plus the Winter Games and at the end of the summer, the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow which is another opportunity to bring the nation together.

Far from fragmenting the audience into its constituent members, the second screen looks set to reunite them in interacting with a live event in ways that were never possible with broadcast TV alone.

LINK:	http://www.ibc.org/page.cfm/action=library/libID=2/libEntryID=220/list...
	See more stories from ibc

Most recent headlines