Vinayak Shrivastav is CEO and cofounder of VideoVerse.
Imagine sitting in a living room in Tokyo, watching an American football game in Dallas. The commentary and stats are auto-translated into Japanese, and every moment feels as though it was produced for a local audience.
Similar localization occurs less in other forms of entertainment, such as film, which have created truly global franchises over the last two decades. A movie about superheroes produced in Hollywood is received with as much fanfare in Seoul, South Korea as in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
How, then, can sports leagues and broadcasters achieve a similar level of global success? In a word: technology. The advent of AI and automation can make it easier for sports brands to popularize their games and content with global audiences.
Here are three areas where AI can assist in the localization of sports coverage:
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Real-time machine translation (RTMT) is already used extensively in diplomacy and international relations for live translations of discussions. This technology, which relies on NLP, can also be used by leagues and broadcasters can auto-detect the speech of their commentary team, including both the play-by-play and color commentator. For local viewers, this speech can then be displayed as captions at the bottom of the screen.
Crucially, these captions can be translated in real-time for viewers in other countries, making foreign sports infinitely more engaging and much easier to localize. They will understand the rules, the actions occurring on the field and the larger and smaller narratives that shape every competition.
The caveat is that RTMT may struggle with jargon, cultural idioms or homonyms. For example, the meaning of “home run” is clear to any English-speaking baseball fan, but if this is auto-translated literally into the vernacular, the resulting phrase may be nonsensical. Because these challenges will always persist, broadcasters need to ensure that the provider is continually training its base model to minimize such mistranslations.
Augmented Reality (AR)
UFC 306 was the first sports event held at The Sphere, a state-of-the-art venue in Las Vegas with immersive LED screens encompassing the entire inner dome. The fighters fought against different backdrops that paid tribute to both Mexico in general and its combat history in particular.
The National Basketball Association has also bought into AR, allowing fans to insert their likeness into a game through the official NBA app, where it would be modeled onto one of the actual players. With the falling cost of AR and its growing user acceptance, more sports leagues and broadcasters can deliver similarly immersive experiences that transcend culture.
Early studies have shown that fan reception of AR is overwhelmingly positive. Some fans, however, do comment that AR can be overwhelming, flooding them with too much information or sensory detail. To address this criticism, broadcasters need to be mindful that any implementation of AR is not excessive and fans can turn it on or off as needed. They then must provide market education on how to activate or deactivate the AR functionality as their interest demands.
Geogating
Geogating may seem counterintuitive: Isn’t geogating, after all, about restricting who has access to what content? Yes, but it’s also essential to the growth of sports.
Previously, geogating was handled by digital rights management (DRM), which was easy to bypass through technologies as simple as a virtual private network (VPN). Because DRM software relied principally on a person’s IP address to determine what to geogate, the VPN would simply change their IP address to a market where their desired content is not geogated. As a result, sports fans often gain unauthorized access to major broadcasts.
Geolocating via AI is much more powerful, relying on various signals, including device metadata, GPS data and ML patterns about the person’s environment and context. The multiplicity of signals creates security: It would be theoretically impossible for a user to game this data. In turn, this security ensures viewers can only watch a sport when it’s officially licensed. While they may have to wait a little longer, they get a viewing experience that is more likely to engage them in the long run.
When geogating, brands need to pay attention to the evolving regulatory environment. The European Union, for example, has passed a geoblocking regulation that stipulates businesses must provide the same access to goods and services to all member states. Sports broadcasters must treat the EU as a monolithic region, choosing to extend or deny access to a piece of content for all states as a whole.
Brands must also be aware that geogating may occasionally cause user frustration: Fans may be irritated that they cannot watch a piece of content, even if they are not legally allowed to do so. In these instances, brands can head off such issues by suggesting alternative, similar sports content that the fan has legitimate access to, which shows your brand cares enough to anticipate user needs.
Overall, geogating enforces a measured approach to global growth. Sports brands can scale on their terms.
Conclusion
Sports broadcasters eager for international audiences should pay attention to these seismic shifts. Auto-generated captions, AR and geogating can popularize global sports that were once only limited to local broadcasts and fans.
To achieve this goal, broadcasters and leagues must have a paradigm shift: They must see their sport from the perspective of fans around the world eager to embrace them.
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