Industry Insights: Sports production becomes a multi-platform operation

Sports production is increasingly being designed around what happens beyond the primary broadcast, with workflows supporting streaming, social, mobile and direct-to-consumer experiences alongside traditional coverage.

In part four of this four-part Industry Insights roundtable, broadcast technology leaders examine how sports organizations are turning live events into multi-platform content engines, creating clips, highlights, vertical video and personalized experiences while the action is still unfolding. The discussion also looks ahead to the technologies expected to shape the next several years, including AI-assisted production, software-defined infrastructure, IP workflows and more flexible hybrid architectures.

The conversation closes by considering the issues that may deserve greater attention, from workforce skills and interoperability to accessibility, content protection, measurement and sustainable monetization.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• One event, many outputs: Sports organizations are increasingly designing production workflows to generate broadcast, streaming, social, mobile and direct-to-consumer content from the same live event.
• Speed drives relevance: Automated clipping, vertical video and shared media access are helping teams publish platform-specific content while moments are still relevant to fans.
• AI becomes infrastructure: AI is moving deeper into live workflows for metadata, clipping, monitoring, localization and production assistance while human teams retain editorial responsibility.
• Software increases flexibility: IP, cloud and software-defined architectures are enabling resources and workflows to move more freely across venues, facilities and platforms.
• People remain critical: Skills, interoperability, operational discipline, accessibility, protection and monetization will matter as much as new technology in determining whether increasingly complex workflows succeed.

How are sports organizations using production workflows to create content for social, streaming and direct-to-consumer platforms alongside traditional broadcasts?

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Sports organizations are no longer producing content for a single destination. Every live event must simultaneously support broadcast, streaming, social media, and direct-to-consumer platforms, each with different audience expectations and formats. As a result, production workflows are becoming more automated, data-driven, and optimized for rapid content creation and distribution across multiple screens in near real time.

Srividhya Srinivasan, CTO, Amagi: Broadcasters increasingly expect a single production workflow to generate multiple outputs rather than producing separate versions for each platform. Live feeds can now be repurposed quickly into clips, highlights and social assets and regional variations, allowing rights holders to reach audiences wherever they choose to watch. Cloud-based workflows make that process faster and more cost effective while maintaining consistency across platforms.

Albert Lee, sales director, Accedo: Sports organizations are increasingly adopting a multi-output production approach where every live event generates multiple assets, from the full live stream and VOD replay to highlights, short-form clips, social assets, shoulder programming, and personalized app content. In this landscape, direct-to-consumer services become the owned destination where that content can continue creating value even after the live event ends. OTT platforms need flexible content models, metadata, CMS workflows, and app components to support this multi-output production approach.

Andrew Ward, business development manager, Cinegy: Broadcast production is now firmly in the digital domain, so video and audio are just data, which can be provided as a stream just as easily as being sent to an antenna. Furthermore, metadata can be combined with video and audio either in a transport stream via PIDs or in a suitable wrapper like MXF. This is not, per se, “creating” content, as this data was always there, but before it was supplied by commentators and captions; nowadays it can be kept, stored and reused as an integral part of the media along with the audio and video components giving sports organisations the opportunity to present their events in their own way, making best use of that information for the enjoyment of the consumer.

Sarah Hackforth, director, international sales, Big Blue Marble: Sports organizations are designing workflows so the live feed can be reused while the event is still happening, not only clipped and edited afterwards. The best example is vertical video, where the same live action needs to be converted into mobile-ready content quickly enough to be reshared during the event. Manual conversion is usually too slow to make sure the clip itself is still relevant to the game.

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Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: Rights holders are increasingly building content factories around a single live event, spinning off clips, vertical video and platform-native cuts in near real time. The key enabler is shared, low-latency access to media so distributed teams can pull what they need without duplicating files or waiting for handoffs. This turns one game into dozens of tailored assets, each shaped for how a specific audience actually watches.

Abe Abt, senior product consultant, AJA Video Systems: Sports organizations are building workflows that can create and deliver multiple versions of the same event for different audiences and platforms faster and more efficiently. A single production pipeline can now simultaneously generate a traditional broadcast, several streaming feeds, vertical social clips, highlights, and alternate commentary. Flexible routing, video capture and recording, and encoding tools help teams create and distribute this additional content to various platforms without building a separate production system for every destination.

Steph Lone, global leader, solutions architecture, media and entertainment, Amazon Web Services: Broadcasters like NBCUniversal are using AWS Elemental Inference to deliver vertical video on Peacock in real-time during major live events, reaching fans on mobile with just 6 to 10 seconds of latency. ViewLift is doing the same, transforming what used to be manual, labor-intensive clip generation into automated workflows that deliver results in minutes during live broadcasts. The through-line is the same: get content to audiences on social and mobile while the moment is still relevant, not hours later.

Paul Pastor, chief business officer, Quickplay: Clipping the big goal, the drama, the breakout play in real time and pushing it back to fans turns a one-match viewer into a daily one. It creates a habit, and habits equal retention. We’ve seen post-event retention rise 30% in the moments right after a live game for a tier-one broadcaster, and 38% greater retention through the season when short-form clips, user-generated content and creator content kept fans engaged between matches.

How are broadcasters approaching fan engagement across multiple screens and platforms during live events?

Dave Dembowski, CRO, Operative: Broadcasters know their fans are multitasking. The goal is to get them to tune in and then have enhanced viewing on another screen versus distracted viewing. Enhanced viewing comes in the form of stats updates, sideline interviews, and replays. Partnerships with brands, fantasy and betting apps can help make the experience seamless.

Alistair Horne, co-founder, Stingr Tech: Broadcasters need to stop treating the phone like an intrusion, because for most fans watching sport, it’s already part of the experience whether anyone likes it or not. They’re checking stats, searching for players, reacting on social media, looking things up the second they see something interesting. That’s happening regardless. The only real question is whether it happens somewhere the broadcaster, rights holder or sports body has any influence over, or whether all of that attention, and the data that comes with it, just leaks away to someone else entirely.

Xavier Leclercq, VP, business development, Broadpeak: Broadcasters are investing in ways to recreate and tailor content for different platforms — for example vertical video, instant highlights on social channels, or creator-led streams. When you’re delivering multi-screen experiences, consistency is everything. Viewers expect every screen to stay synchronized during live events, and sponsors and advertisers want confidence that campaigns will perform consistently regardless of the device being used.

Srividhya Srinivasan, CTO, Amagi: Fans increasingly expect experiences that extend beyond the primary broadcast, whether that’s highlights, companion content or personalized viewing experiences across connected devices. Rich metadata and AI-assisted workflows help broadcasters surface more relevant content and make it easier for viewers to discover what matters most to them. The opportunity is to keep audiences engaged before, during and after the live event, rather than treating the broadcast as a single moment in time.

Alex Zambelli, director of product, Bitmovin: The way fans engage with sports content has changed massively in recent years with the majority of fans now also engaging with sports content on a second screen while watching the main live broadcast. Broadcasters are realizing that they can’t only wait for fans to come to their streaming platform, they must also go to devices and platforms where the fans already are. Being able to quickly assemble highlight clips or publish vertical short-form videos is a fundamental part of delivering these second screen experiences.

Albert Lee, sales director, Accedo: Rather than just watching on one screen and in one sitting, a typical fan may discover a highlight on social, open the mobile app, watch the live event on CTV, and return later for a replay. For sports providers, the challenge with this is creating continuity across every touchpoint: A fan wants their favorites, watch history, recommendations, notifications, and playback state to be remembered no matter what device or platform they are using. Having said that, a multi-platform sports experience should feel consistent, but not identical everywhere.

Sarah Hackforth, director, international sales, Big Blue Marble: The stronger approach is to connect touchpoints around the event itself, so each screen has a clear role rather than competing for attention. That can mean surfacing live match statistics in the app, using metadata to recommend clips connected to a player or key moment, offering alternate angles or near-live highlights, or preparing vertical formats for mobile while the game is still in progress. The aim is not to distract from the live event but to give fans more ways to follow the same story.

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: Engagement is becoming personal rather than universal, with alternate commentary, data overlays and interactive feeds letting fans build their own version of the broadcast. The strongest strategies meet audiences where they already are, whether that’s a second screen, a social feed or a direct-to-consumer app. What matters most is consistency of quality across every touchpoint, so the experience feels intentional rather than fragmented.

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What emerging technologies or workflow trends do you believe will have the greatest impact on sports production over the next three to five years?

Nicola Milburn, technical sales manager, Hitomi Broadcast: A major change will be measurement moving inside software and virtualized production environments. We are already seeing production workflows spread across more locations and platforms, and the areas operators need to verify are expanding too, from timing through to whether pictures have been processed as intended. Being able to gather that measurement data at different points in the signal path should make increasingly complex production environments much easier to understand and optimize.

Russell Trafford-Jones, industry engagement manager, Techex: The Dynamic Media Facility and its Media eXchange Layer are the developments I would watch most closely, because together they point toward facilities built from modular software functions running on general-purpose compute. What makes that significant is that this is an open, broadcaster-led effort intended to let best-of-breed tools from multiple vendors work together through a common framework, rather than requiring bespoke integration every time. It is still early, but sport is the ultimate test of scale, speed and reliability, so it is likely to be one of the places where the value of DMF and MXL becomes clearest first.

Peder Boberg, product owner, Intinor: Pairing private 5G networks with cellular bonding changes how wireless cameras can be used, by removing strict spectrum limits and high operational costs. This gives operators genuine mobility across large venues without worrying about signal drops. As a result, even lower-tier sports can afford to produce dynamic, multi-camera coverage on a tight technical budget.

Dave Dembowski, CRO, Operative: Revenue management is a critical component of next generation sports production. What used to consist of ad slots sold during games on TV has exploded to include streaming, digital channels, social and partnerships. Keeping advertiser relationships and product and pricing information in a unified system that can optimize for the viewer experience and for revenue gives broadcasters more control and higher performance.

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: The most significant changes will come from the convergence of AI, cloud-native production, real-time analytics, and personalized streaming. These technologies are helping sports organizations create content more efficiently while delivering viewing experiences tailored to individual fans. Over the next several years, the ability to understand audience behavior and dynamically adapt content across devices and platforms will become a key competitive advantage.

Sergio Ammirata, Ph.D., founder and chief scientist, SipRadius: The great joy of IP connectivity and software-defined architectures is that they are completely flexible, so you can develop new hybrid architectures which mix the solutions. Bandwidth and consistent latency are the critical factors in making full remote production work: if you can guarantee a low latency 100 megabit path but not gigabits, then maybe put the hardware in a truck on location and control it — or part of it — from the home master control.

Colin Moran, VP, production products, LTN: Over the next few years, the continued move toward IP-based production and distribution will have a significant impact on how live sports are produced and delivered. We’re also seeing growing demand for workflows that connect acquisition, production, customization, and distribution more closely together. That allows rights holders to respond more quickly to new opportunities while making better use of existing resources.

Paul Davies, head of marketing, Yospace: New non-linear ad formats from the IAB’s Ad Format Hero project are going to be huge in sports, especially as rights-holders seek an ROI on their increased spend on the rights packages. Server-guided ad insertion (SGAI), the latest iteration of dynamic ad insertion, will bring viewing and advertising benefits, too.

Andy Rayner, CTO, Appear: The next stage of sports production is about making distributed workflows easier to manage. Broadcasters want infrastructure that can move live content between venues, production hubs and cloud environments without adding complexity. Newer frameworks including DMF and MXL will improve interoperability between applications running across hybrid environments. The goal is to build workflows that are flexible enough to support different sports, different venues and different production models while becoming simpler to operate.

Albert Lee, sales director, Accedo: Sports organizations are increasingly looking to own the fan relationship, enabling them to collect first-party data and create meaningful engagement. Direct-to-consumer platforms will therefore become increasingly important to enable this. In terms of production, we’re starting to see cloud and remote production making it more feasible for sports organizations to produce and distribute more events, especially outside the top-tier broadcast environment. This will help to make niche and less popular sports easier to access.

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Sarah Hackforth, director, international sales, Big Blue Marble: The workflows that will define how broadcasters and rights holders operate are the ones that get more from the same live event without compromising quality, rights, or editorial control. That means AI handling the time-consuming and repetitive parts of production, metadata generation, clipping, format adaptation, quality monitoring, while human expertise stays focused on the decisions that require judgement and experience. That is a different proposition from AI as a post-production shortcut. It is AI as part of the live infrastructure itself, so content is ready for broadcast, streaming, social, and mobile at the same time rather than sequentially.

Rob Willox, director, product marketing, live production, Sony Electronics: An emerging technology that is helping to transform many industries is AI. For sports production, AI-enabled PTZ cameras with a small footprint enable cost effective production for lower and mid-range sports and leagues, allowing them to offer unique vantage points, while offering cost savings. The rest is top secret! 

Doug Price, global head, commercial & operations, broadcast solutions, Hawk-Eye Innovations: The biggest impacts we are seeing today is the transition to ST2110 and REMI productions.  One supports the other, in my opinion. With more technology depending on the flexibility that ST 2110 offers we will see more REMI productions become possible, allowing productions to become more storytelling driven than reactionary. There is still a long path to moving facilities to the 2110 workflows and that transition will be driven by the new technologists entering the industry with fresh ideas and foundations built around this connectivity.

Jan Schaffner, VP, managed technology, Americas, Riedel Communications: The greatest impact will come from the convergence of AI-assisted production, software-defined cloud workflows, real-time tracking and resilient wireless acquisition. AI will increasingly operate as a production copilot — logging content, generating metadata, finding replays, creating highlights, translating commentary and producing additional versions — while editorial responsibility will remain with human production teams.

Ole-Andreas Løvland, CEO and co-founder, Bitfocus: Over the next few years the biggest change in sports production we expect to see is a shift away from operators controlling specific pieces of equipment towards controlling events and workflows: the stack connected once, automation applied where practical, and manual interventions allocated to the operator best suited to each. It is the thinking behind tools like Bitfocus Buttons, where each operator gets a control surface tailored to their role, whether the equipment they are triggering is in the machine room next door or at a venue on the other side of the world.

Jimbo Haneklau, VP, sales, sports and live events, Imagine Communications: Over the next three to five years, we’ll see a transition from proprietary software-defined production environments to standards-based environments built on the EBU/AMWA Dynamic Media Facilities project. The work of the JT-DMF will provide a vendor-neutral framework that accelerates the deployment and integration of software-based workflow elements — much as ST 2110 enabled multivendor IP interoperability — creating a path to the economic benefits of scalable operations, dynamic resource deployment, and production teams working across multiple venues and locations. Those foundations will also enable broader use of automation and AI to streamline workflows, optimize resource allocation, and improve operational decision-making, with the greatest impact coming from unified production environments that are easier to scale, manage, and adapt as production demands continue to evolve.

Nav Khangura, VP, sales and business development, UK & EMEA, TMT Insights: Over the next three to five years AI, cloud-native production, digital first and IP-based infrastructure will continue transforming how sports content is created and distributed. As audiences shift their consumption habits, we’re likely to see AI drive more automation and enable new viewing experiences previously unimaginable. Together, these technologies enable organizations to scale global operations while delivering increasingly localized and personalized fan experiences.

Kevin Wittnebert, senior director, public venues, sports and entertainment, Extreme Networks: Many responses to this question will focus on AI, but the truth is that even futuristic AI-assisted production, automated highlights, advanced analytics and personalized viewing experiences all depend on moving large amounts of data quickly and reliably. Without infrastructure that’s designed to support high-bandwidth use cases like live streaming, AI-augmented broadcasts, and generated replays, broadcasters will struggle to deliver the live experience fans expect. As demands on broadcasters continue to increase, the network will only become more important in delivering the final product for fans.

Suzana Brady, VP, worldwide sales and marketing, Cobalt Digital: The industry will continue moving toward software-defined, IP-based production with technologies such as IPMX gaining more popularity with the promise of greater interoperability between broadcast and AV environments, supporting multi-vendor infrastructures and eliminating the need to be locked into a single ecosystem. And, of course, AI-assisted tools will increase productivity by assuming more responsibility for routine tasks, allowing teams to “do more with less” and focus on creativity.

Dave MacKinnon, VP, product management, Clear-Com: AI will have a major impact over the next few years, especially in how data is used and how production decisions are simplified during a live event. But for the foreseeable future, sports production will still need people on the ground to manage cameras, automation and the realities of live execution. AI is much more likely to be a force multiplier than a force replacement.

What are we not discussing that we should be?

Nicola Milburn, technical sales manager, Hitomi Broadcast: I do not think we are talking enough about the skills gap that comes with the move to IP and software-based production. There are excellent broadcast specialists who have spent their careers working with SDI, and excellent IT specialists who understand networks, but those two areas of knowledge do not automatically overlap. As sports production becomes more software and IP-based, bringing those skills together is going to be just as important as the technology itself.

Dave Dembowski, CRO, Operative: Fandom is an exploding opportunity for broadcasters and rights holders, and it is taking shape in real time. It’s important to build strong bonds with fans and listen to what they need, not just fall back on old habits. Younger fans are social-first and on-demand and they will want high engagement with individual athletes and behind the scenes content that rights holders can monetize effectively if they get it right.

Colin Moran, VP, production products, LTN: One topic that deserves more attention is how future sports workflows will be designed around the fan experience. The real question is how we deliver the right experience to every viewer, whether they’re looking for a traditional lean-back broadcast or a more interactive, data-rich, lean-in experience. That shift makes data and metadata just as important as the video itself. They need to flow through the entire media supply chain, enabling everything from personalized commentary and localized graphics to real-time highlights, betting integrations, AI-driven clipping, and automated content versioning.

Paul Davies, head of marketing, Yospace: Measurement. As an industry, we talk a lot about targeting and stitching and scale, but it’s ad measurement that ultimately allows media companies to be paid. Advertisers increasingly expect deep viewability metrics in the digital space, and media companies are under pressure to provide it across their full audience, no matter what device or streaming service they are using, whether it’s an owned and operated app or a third-party syndication service.

Xavier Leclercq, VP, business development, Broadpeak: The shift to streaming is fueling a new relationship between content providers and network operators as audiences for live events surge. Teams we speak with are now planning for events reaching a hundred million concurrent viewers within a few years. Technologies such as multicast ABR have already shown they can dramatically reduce network traffic to handle these types of spikes in demand, while maintaining the quality and flexibility viewers expect. Technologies such as Media over QUIC are also worth watching as they mature, with the potential to complement these more efficient delivery models and improve latency in high-demand use cases like sports betting.

Andrew Ward, business development manager, Cinegy: In our opinion, new ways of doing things. Change is always a challenge, and moving to software-based digital production brings with it completely new ways of arriving at desired results. Nevertheless, engineers and managers seem often to fall into the trap of trying to replicate old workflows. What is often needed is a “tabula rasa” approach, which works backwards from a desired outcome and looks at all the possible ways that it might be achieved using modern tools and techniques.

Sarah Hackforth, director, international sales, Big Blue Marble: One area that deserves far more attention is content protection, particularly as sports rights become more valuable and streaming workflows become more distributed. Content now moves across IP and cloud-based workflows involving multiple systems, partners, and distribution points before it reaches viewers, expanding the risk surface for piracy and making content protection harder to manage across the full delivery chain. In live sports, response speed matters just as much as detection because action taken hours later is often too late to protect the value of the content.

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: We spend a lot of energy on cameras, codecs and the cloud, but not nearly enough on the people and processes that hold it all together. As workflows become more distributed and data-rich, the operational discipline around how teams access, organize and share media at scale becomes the real differentiator. The next competitive edge won’t come from a single piece of hardware; it will come from the frameworks that let creative teams work without friction, wherever they are.

Doug Price, global head, commercial & operations, broadcast solutions, Hawk-Eye Innovations: The elephant in the room is the workforce pipeline. Traditional SDI engineers are retiring rapidly, and the industry isn’t replacing them fast enough with engineers who can support ST 2110 and IP workflows. On top of that, the newer talent entering the space has a very different background — they’re IT and software natives, so they don’t have that deep, legacy broadcast intuition yet. It’s going to create a pretty bumpy transition period, but it also forces the industry to finally adopt modern, software-defined architectures.

Costa Nikols, executive-team strategy advisor, media and entertainment, Telos Alliance: Interoperability is becoming an increasingly important topic as production moves to the cloud. At the same time, wider regulatory changes, including California’s streaming loudness requirements and evolving accessibility requirements in the U.S. and Europe, are pushing broadcasters to modernize how they process and deliver audio. These developments will ultimately improve both operational efficiency and the viewing experience.

Jimbo Haneklau, VP, sales, sports and live events, Imagine Communications: One topic that deserves attention is how relevant cloud is becoming for regional sports networks and large broadcasters looking to scale coverage without scaling headcount, as we’ve seen with major networks deploying cloud for events like the Winter Games and regional providers using burst capacity to deliver more channels more efficiently. The winning proposition isn’t cloud-only production, but seamless orchestration across hybrid cloud and on-premises infrastructure — eliminating the need to fly production teams around the world while still delivering high-quality coverage across regions. The systems that will define this space are those that make hybrid environments feel unified, automating resource allocation and workflow management regardless of where production is physically happening.

Steph Lone, global leader, solutions architecture, media and entertainment, Amazon Web Services: The accessibility gap. As streaming becomes the default for live sports, we need to make sure the viewing experience is equally available and equally good for every fan, regardless of device, bandwidth, or ability. The technology exists to deliver adaptive bitrate, real-time captions, and multi-language commentary at scale, and the organizations investing in that inclusivity now will build the most loyal audiences long-term.

Nav Khangura, VP, sales and business development, UK & EMEA, TMT Insights: With the rise of AI and digital platforms, the industry often focuses on technology but the bigger topic that needs further discussion is sustainable monetization. Technology enables creative innovation across sports production, but sustainable monetization in sports requires new models to be explored to keep audiences engaged with new monetization strategies. Success will depend on building production and distribution workflows that support these new revenue models, while remaining operationally efficient at scale.