Most DTC conversations I have with rights holders start with the live stream: the player, the latency, the app.
That part matters. But after working with 350+ sports organizations, I think the stream is where the fan relationship starts, and what happens after the final whistle decides whether you keep that fan.
International fans follow a team or an athlete across time zones, on their phone. A parent in São Paulo following their daughter at a university championship in Germany. A European fan tracking this year's NBA draft picks. Most of the time they can't watch live. When they can, they still want the moment that turned the match, the reaction, the part they missed while they were asleep.
A live stream gets a few hours of attention per event. Highlights, stories and the archive keep working long after that, and that's where most rights holders still underinvest.
In our experience it's rarely a lack of ambition. Footage sits with host broadcasters, production crews and on hard drives, tagged inconsistently or not at all. By the time someone finds the clip, the fan has moved on.
Two things decide whether you capture that value
Speed. The right moment has to reach the right fan in minutes. A highlight delivered tomorrow competes with everything else that happened today.
Findability. Content indexed by athlete, team, action and sponsor can be resurfaced and relicensed next week or in ten years. If it isn't indexed, you're mostly paying to store it. We just finished moving the NHL's 30PB archive onto ScorePlay for exactly this reason.
That's the problem we built ScorePlay to solve. Every photo and every second of video is tagged automatically as it comes in, so production teams spend their time telling stories instead of searching through folders.
Your partners already have the audience
Your own channels are only part of the reach. Broadcasters, sponsors, clubs and athletes all have audiences, and when they get the right clips quickly, cleared and branded, they publish them. Each post can send people back to your app at no media cost, with first-party data you keep. Athletes are one example: more than 10,000 already get their content through the ScorePlay app.
The next bottleneck is the edit
Even when every second is tagged and easy to find, someone still has to turn footage into a story: pick the moments, cut the piece, adapt it for each format and each audience. Today that depends on having an editor available, and no rights holder has enough editors to cover every match, every market and every athlete.
So the next step is automating more of the production itself, so a tagged moment becomes a finished, branded piece of content for each audience without waiting in an editor's queue. We're working on this now and will have more to share soon.
Where this goes
Rights holders will run like media companies that own a library. Revenue will come from direct audiences, from sponsors seen inside clips, from broadcasters served faster, and from an archive that gains value with every edition.
That only works if the content layer stays the same while venues, crews and broadcasters change. Footage lands in one place, gets tagged the same way every time, and goes out to partners, athletes and your app, during the event and long after it. That's what we're building at ScorePlay.
I'll be discussing this with Gibran Khan (Head of Media, FISU) and Manik Bambha (President, ViewLift) at SPORTEL Monaco on October 20 at 11:45. Come say hi if you're there.
