2019’s SVG Summit presents a thrilling look into a new decade of sports production

Last week, Signiant had the pleasure of sponsoring this year’s SVG Summit, an annual conference dedicated to organizations that work with or participate in sports production, content creation and distribution. This year, more than fifteen hundred industry experts attended the event to share their diverse insights into the industry via panels, workshops and other networking opportunities.

Sports production is transforming quickly

This year, the event was especially thrilling, as there’s currently so much going on in sports production. The technological innovations around graphics and AR, the advancement of resolutions, the distribution via OTT platforms, and the integration of social media all combine to make sports production a hot and dynamic market right now. As a fan, it’s always exciting to get such immersive experiences, but from a business perspective, understanding how these factors will affect the industry is equally interesting.

Sports production is becoming more adaptable…and more complicated

Of the many themes that panelists and innovators discussed, two stood out in particular: remote production and the challenge of archiving content.

Remote sports production continues to be both an area of growth and innovation. Not only does REMI offer improved efficiency for broadcasters, it makes it easier to adopt new and exciting technologies, since it would normally be hard to keep adding new equipment and specialists at the venue. But with the team back home, you now have the opportunity to leverage the latest tools for things like graphics and highlight edits — and some of the new tools are amazing! So, while remote production was initially being driven as a cost-saver, it appears to be enabling new capabilities, as well (which of course means more file movement).

Archiving is also an area with growing challenges. With so many cameras shooting in higher resolutions, the amount of data that needs to be stored is exploding. Adding to this that licensing deals are increasingly numerous and complex, it’s hard for organizations to know how long to store footage, what formats to store it in, who should store it and for how long.  We live in a ‘don’t delete anything world,’ but that creates cost and complexity — especially with search and fast retrieval when that must have clip must be located and delivered on short notice. Cloud technologies will certainly play a key role here, but it’s a complicated and growing challenge that intersects with another important theme which goes beyond sports and across all media: building for a hybrid cloud/multi-cloud world.

2020 promises exciting developments in sports, and Esports

The Summit also shared some love for the Esports industry, so I certainly think we’re going to see the continued explosion of Esports. As someone who was skeptical of the trend in previous years, I was personally blown away by some of the metrics on Esports as well as the highlight reels that I got to watch. This is a hot area, and the industry is starting to pay close attention. The themes previously discussed — OTT, remote production, social media integration, licensing, and AR — are going to be equally important when it comes to the Esports phenomenon, and media organizations will need to pay attention

There’s still a lot to figure out from both a business and a technology perspective but these trends will continue in 2020 and through the decade, in all corners of the industry. It will certainly be interesting to see how some of the nontraditional players — including Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, etc. — will participate more in sports and Esports in 2020, and in which areas they’ll find the most success. 

It’s all good news for Signiant

All of this complexity and evolution is great tailwind for Signiant, as we play an important role in abstracting distance and storage type, and enable easy, secure cross company collaboration. Of course, files continue to get bigger, but turnaround times are getting shorter, globalization of content continues, and security challenges are on the rise. Signiant’s SaaS platform will continue to play a key role in helping businesses remain agile and become more responsive to the dynamics of this market.

Exciting times ahead for all!