SVG Sit-Down: How the XR Sports Alliance Makes XR Easier Than Ever for Rightsholders

The year-old organization is ‘a learn, test, and produce community’

XR sports coverage, from production all the way through to delivery in VR headsets, is a complicated landscape. That complication led to last year’s founding of the XR Sports Alliance by Accedo, HBS, and Qualcomm. Today, the organization has 22 partners who are committed to making deployment of the XR experience easier, faster, cheaper, and, above all, better. SVG had a chance to learn more about the XR Sports Alliance at Sportel during a chat with Catriona Tate, sales leader, XR Sports Alliance, and Matthias Greiner, platform and product management, mixed reality, Qualcomm.

Qualcomm’s Matthias Greiner (left) and XR Sports Alliance’s Catriona Tate

XR has been a technology hot spot for a while. Tell us about the XR Sports Alliance and its goals.
Tate: Yes, there has been a lot of innovation going on, obviously, for some time, and the XR Alliance is a nonprofit membership organization where sports rightsholders can join for free and bring together the ecosystem from the production side through to the end-user app and the consumer side. We provide technology enablement along the way and partners. There is a learn, test, and produce community, and you start being able to develop things that are repeatable and scalable. Those involved also learn more about the business models and how to produce content in a way that allows you to have a more immersive piece of storytelling rather than scrambling for a live feed and just lay graphics over the top.

How big is the Alliance?
Tate: We announced our launch last year and now have 22 different members. At Sportel, for example, [people involved with the electric-boat racing] E1 Series discussed their testing with HBS and Aurora this past summer on an app that had 180-degree and 360-degree video. With the XR Alliance, they used our application framework to have pre-integrated technologies so they could go to market with an XR experience without having to build everything from scratch themselves.

How can a rightsholder or content creator get involved?
Tate: The 22 members have come in through the relationships between our three founders — Accedo, HBS, and Qualcomm — or other partners, like Stats Perform or XReal. But others, like the World Climbing League, just reached out to us. We’re interested to see what they were going to do with XR.

Over the years, XR has had some issues. Because the audience is small, there isn’t the payback on investing to create a proper experience, and, when it doesn’t go well, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. How can the XR Alliance change that dynamic?
Tate: We can connect [members] right through to a compelling experience to create a rising-boats-on-a-rising-tide effect. Everything has to rise together, from a consumer experience through to product development and production. We’re trying to provide the conditions and the conversations to get out of siloed innovation budgets and accelerate testing and learning and making XR more scalable and sustainable.

Matthias, you are with Qualcomm. Tell us about how that company got involved with this as one of the three founders?
Greiner: It’s very simple: we are the chip providers for XR devices. The more XR devices that are sold, the more Qualcomm chips are sold. The problem in general in XR is that, to be able to sell more devices, you need to have appealing experiences for the user. I’ve been working in XR for 20 years, and there are a lot of different pieces — hardware, software, UX, UI — that need to come together so that the content for the end user is fun and they want more of it.

In the end, the Alliance is about gaining experience, getting the right tools, getting the right pipelines, getting the right content, and understanding how these kinds of things work together. That’s where I think the XR Sports Alliance is a super-interesting approach. It helps everybody in the ecosystem to become better and to create more-sustainable and -successful content.