Sports broadcasting is a multibillion-dollar business capable of delivering the kind of push broadcasters need for a photo finish. Following a grueling 2009 for broadcasters and content providers, the game-play suddenly changed when the Football World Cup 2010 saw advertisers pumping in ad dollars to nab sport mad viewers. Not just on the box but on their computers too. And as consumers increasingly spend more time online, the Web is no longer just an experimental platform for media outfits. In Asia Pacific alone, entertainment and media spending in Internet advertisements (both wired and mobile) showed doubledigit compound annual increases in the last five years, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers. And then there’s Media 3.0. Before Media 3.0, distributors and content providers delivered content to households via the set-top box. With the explosion of consumers using smartphone and broadband, the focus is rapidly shifting from broad distribution to personalised consumption. Sports content is no exception, as ESPN Star Sports (ESS) notes. “Watching sports online is now taking off in a whole new way with sports, as a genre, being a key driver for the growth and adoption of new digital platforms,” said Adam Zecha, ESS executive vice president and head of sales. “Mobile ESPN provides a great platform for anywhere, anytime sports viewing as fans are consuming more and more content on their handheld devices. Our recent launch of Mobile ESPN on the 3G platform features LIVE and on-demand premium world-class sports including Formula One, Moto GP, FA Cup, Wimbledon, ICC Cricket, Golf Majors such as The Open Championship and the US Open Championship, The OneAsia Tour, the Asean Basketball League.” Zecha added that today media owners see the digital platform more than just a viable advertising medium, it is in fact an important part of staying relevant to viewers and sport fans. Integrated video heightens the experience by showcasing a wide range of content ranging from match highlights, analysis, post-match reviews in addition to exclusive interviews and programme highlights. Content management solutions provider Irdeto agrees. “Our customers have a vision of becoming a ‘content hub’ for their subscribers, offering them their favourite shows, movies and events on their favourite devices, whether it be a STB, PC, mobile phone, tablet, game console, or a connected TV. This means pulling in content from multiple sources, managing the associated metadata, transcoding it for a variety of different target devices, managing multiple DRM schemes, enabling different payment and authorisation options, and usage reporting,” Bengt Jonsson, vice president of sales for Asia Pacific at Irdeto. Irdeto’s key customers include Astro, Foxtel, Viasat and Sky Deutschland. To catch a thief While increasing demand generally creates cheers among network executives, when it comes to integrating premium content with Media 3.0, audience demand tends to spawn illegal downloads and a proliferation of pirated content. “The Web is a big threat for the sports industry,” Sam Bahun, senior account executive for Peer Media Technologies told media. The company provides content protection, copyright enforcement and digital piracy measurement services, and has what it calls a ‘brute force’ presence in file sharing networks. In July last year, Peer Media Technologies conducted a one-week scan of the Web and identified more than 150,000 illegal live-video links to FIFA World Cup, NBA Finals, Wimbledon, NASCAR, and PGA events. The sites that post this video are largely supported by ad revenue. One anti-piracy technology, digital watermarking weaves a unique digital identity into media content. This identity remains constant even through recording, manipulation and editing, compression and decompression, encryption, decryption and broadcast – without affecting quality. Digital watermarks can identify copyrighted content and associated rights, during and after distribution, to determine copyright ownership and enable rights management policy while enabling innovative new content distribution and usage models. It can be tailored to the type of media or file format used for the video as well as customised to a content owner’s workflow or distribution model. Whereas video fingerprinting software identifies, extracts, and then compresses characteristic components of a video file, enabling that video to be uniquely identified by its ‘fingerprint’. It does not rely on any additional information to the video stream. In addition, a reference video fingerprint can be created at any point from any copy of the video. “They’re both unique technologies, and they both have different advantages. You can’t remove a fingerprint because there’s nothing there. Both have features that make them ideal for certain situations,” Tom Miller, director of sales at Civolution, told media at the Sports Asset Management forum held by Sports Video Group in Florida last year. Civolution offers an extensive portfolio of cuttingedge watermarking- and fingerprinting-technology applications for forensic marking of media assets in pre-release, digital cinema, pay TV, and online. Through its solutions portfolio, the company offers comprehensive broadcast-monitoring and online content identification and monetization to facilitate and manage profitable content distribution. “The two primary challenges faced by the industry in a Media 3.0 world are: the need to efficiently ingest, manage and push content out to a wide variety of different devices; and to ensure the content on those devices is adequately protected and remains secure over time,” said Irdeto’s Jonsson. Irdeto offers content protection as part of its comprehensive, full service end-to-end technology solutions for sports television providers. This includes security across conditional access, digital rights management, business support systems, and set-top box software solutions. The company recently announced it was granted key patents in the area of watermarking technology for application in both broadband and broadcast environments. “This technology was built specifically for the protection of premium content like early-release movies and live sports, and can give operators a key advantage in the fight against illegal download and distribution,” Jonsson explained. For the FIFA World Cup 2010, Malaysia pay-TV operator Astro made a bold move and offered its World Cup content free to all viewers in Malaysia. The broadcaster turned to Irdeto for a content management solution to power the live streaming and ondemand broadband delivery of all 64 matches via its Astro B.yond Player. Because Irdeto provides a holistic delivery solution, its technology also allows for online audience measurement. By dispensing with the typical subscriber-only strategy, Astro hoped it would pay off with valuable insight into the needs and profiles of online content consumers in Malaysia. Irdeto worked with Akamai’s HD Network for live streaming in high definition and Microsoft Corp.’s customized player experience with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft PlayReady for content protection. It also engaged Conviva to provide real-time audience monitoring, analytics and reporting, and EVS to deliver on-demand broadcast highlights and clip packages. Al Jazeera Sport also broadcast the matches live on its new website aljazeerasport.tv, which was created specifically for the World Cup with the help of Irdeto. “Irdeto’s unique strength is our ability to package broadcast offerings for a broadband world, while understanding and augmenting the traditional broadcast business,” said Jonsson. And Media 3.0 doesn’t make the task any easier. Once the content reaches the device, Jonsson explained, it’s out of the service provider’s direct control, so the next challenge is to ensure there are extra measures taken to go beyond the current static security model where only digital rights management (DRM) is used, because that’s no longer enough on its own. “We’ve seen catastrophic business model failures in the past when that DRM was hacked,” he said. Protect the King “Today, media owners see the digital platform more than just a viable advertising medium, it is in fact an important part of staying relevant to viewers and sport fans,” said ESS’s Zecha. “What’s key to our success is that ‘Online TV’ is not just about distributing more content from broadcast onto the web. ESPN Player is a highly interactive, user controlled, online sports experience with live, on-demand, and additional exclusive content not seen on any other platform. We consider what best serves the sports fans’ needs, what fuels our business model and what fulfils our advertisers’ respective brand needs.” Recognizing the evolving media landscape, media buyers are responding to the success of the ESPN online delivery platform. “We are finding strong interest from advertisers for credible, authoritative video content, being aware that premium content drives users and our advertising business. Here, ESPN Player supports several revenue models, including integrated and independent sponsorship deals,” Zecha revealed. Mercedes-Benz Singapore came in as a sponsor for Singapore Formula One’s online content last year. To protect their valuable online assets, ESPN Player employs Industry Leading Digital Rights Management solutions. “We operate on a global platform co-developed with ESPN International, which enforces a range of industry standards with regard to security both at a consumer access level and to curb piracy of assets maintained in and by the service,” said Zecha. ESPN works at a number of levels for content security, each offering industry-leading performance in their domain. These include specific video access controls as well as encryption of media. And if all else fails? “We also have a very swift and effective legal process which we do not hesitate to use to bring down pirate signals as and when our dedicated external monitoring team uncovers them. In fact we have been very successful of late in combating online piracy and will be using state of the art technology solutions to seek out and bring down any unauthorised access to the footage,” Zecha adds.