Op-Ed: Sports Teams Need Right-Sized, Enterprise-Grade Tools to Play the Media Game

By Matt Gaede, Vice President, Global Customer Acquisitions, Signiant

The huge content explosion in sports goes beyond traditional broadcasting and now welcomes leagues, teams, individual players and online influencers into the content ecosystem. The stadiums, especially for leagues like the NFL, have become interactive multimedia experiences with hundreds of screens; players have their own teams who focus on their individual brands to increase monetization opportunities beyond their playing careers; and online influencers provide more insight into the game and continue to grow and drive further demand for content.

Sports franchises have their own production crews creating content before, during and after the game. Many clubs, for instance, have full-fledged production and post-production infrastructure to create content for their stadium’s jumbotrons, social media platforms, website, player branding, and for the regional sports network. The team within the team is tasked with keeping fans engaged all year round. With new roles like “media operations,” “creative services and content,” and “post-production manager,” teams are, in a sense, becoming media companies.

The increasing volume of content and requests add layers to an already complex set of media operations at the team level that is simply unprecedented.

The Pain Points
Content is everywhere, stored in multiple locations and disparate systems. When content requests come in, those complex storage environments make it hard to find assets quickly.

Delivery must be fast. Teams must simultaneously fulfill requests from news outlets, social media influencers, players and more. Everyone receiving content has their own specification in terms of standards they want content delivered in, creating multiple parallel workstreams.

This is being done today, for the most part, with manual processes not designed for this volume or complexity. As a result, processes are inefficient, there is much duplication of effort, costs go up, and worst of all — providers experience failure to fulfill!

Playing the Media Game
The Content Management Forum, sponsored by SVG (Sports Video Group), underscores the rise of content management as a critical area of importance for live sports producers. I had the chance to present the concept about teams needing to play the media game and how the Signiant Platform plays a role at last year’s event. Here’s an excerpt of that talk.

Designing the Winning Play
Professional teams who create and distribute content need enterprise-class technology, but they don’t need a league-size infrastructure. What they do need are fit-for-purpose tools that make it easy to find assets, perform quick edits and quickly get content where it needs to go in the right format across a wide variety of delivery specs.

With years of experience serving the world’s biggest and most powerful sports leagues and broadcasters, the Signiant Platform is now being used to create significant operational efficiencies and cost savings for sports teams around the world including Dallas Cowboys, New York Mets, Orlando Magic, Manchester City Football Club, Toronto Maple Leafs, and many more.

Want to learn more? I invite you to explore the Signiant Sports Collection of articles, videos, infographics and checklists to learn more about managing the content explosion in sports production.