Latin America. The First World Cup was played in Uruguay in 1930 and managed to bring together only 13 countries that overcame a long series of obstacles – administrative, political, economic and logistical – to reach this small South American country. With 13 brave people who made history began a phenomenon that has not stopped growing and evolving to become the most watched sporting event in the world, surpassing even the successful Super Bowl.
But how did it get here? According to the Ooyala company, although not everything has been honey on flakes, the success of the World Cup has a lot to do with the task that television broadcasters have done to broadcast the matches and in recent years, with online broadcasts that contribute to increase the reach.
Football was the sport that opened the doors to the sports television business because it is an activity that can guarantee a constant economic benefit to the enormous investments of its sponsors.
"I have been involved in the live broadcast of sporting events for 20 years, and never before have we experienced so many possibilities, both from the business and from the technical tools at hand, and especially, from the point of view of the spectator. We welcome technology to sport," said Patricio Cummins, Ooyala's vice president for the Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) region.
The influence of technology on sports broadcasts was reflected in the popularity of the World Cup held in Brazil in 2014, as the match in which the final was played reached a television audience of one billion people, the total number of the tournament reached three thousand two hundred million fans.
Pleasure of a few
Football has come a long way to reach the audience levels it enjoys today. In 1954, the World Cup held in Switzerland was the first significant football event broadcast in Europe and the press was not yet involved in the broadcasts or broadcast of the matches. By the 50s, there was already more elaborate work by European clubs and UEFA. Two factors definitely drove the success: the legendary match between Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt – played in Glasgow in 1960 – in which the merengue team defeated the Germans 7-3; coupled with the production and sale of much cheaper televisions, a factor that allowed fans to access them.
A year earlier, Real Madrid and Barcelona starred in the first televised classic; phenomenon that caused the city of Barcelona to sell out the televisions a few days before the game. For the first time, a million viewers sat in front of the TV to watch a football match.
On this side of the world
In Latin America, efforts to position sports television were few; in Chile 62 the World Cup was completely filmed to present the images later in Europe. A few months earlier, in the United States, slow-motion repetition was invented and with it came the possibility of improving the experience of spectators, by giving them the opportunity to relive the best moments of the game. This gave an advantage to the broadcast over attending to watch a match at the stadium.
Slow motion was the first innovation that preceded the huge wave of technological changes that would revolutionize the television coverage of the sport in the following twenty years, always encouraged by the impressive numbers of viewers that football offered to television companies.
The first event broadcast live was the 1970 World Cup that took place in Mexico and with it football was imposed as a television product that would reach the whole world, on par with color television.
At this stage of the World Cup, fans gathered around a TV to follow the matches of their favorite teams because only some homes could access them. It was gradually that families were integrating televisions to be able to watch these events privately. Added to this was the need to hire PPE—pay-for-events—or cable television; then the phenomenon of sharing televisions was repeated, but this time it was not the lack of devices but the payment of subscriptions.
The way in which people watch sports has changed, encouraging the same family to support several teams, even watching different games simultaneously in a single house.
This is what Russia 2018 will look like
In Brazil 2014 fans turned to new technologies to watch World Cup matches; 280 million of them watched the matches online or from a mobile device. It is expected that this figure will be considerably exceeded in Russia 2018, as it comes at the height of the use of tablets and smartphones.
Already in 2014 – and perhaps with the aim of seeing his favorite team stand out in Brazil – Ooyala had detected that 34% of people who watched sports did so from their smartphones. In 2016 this figure increased considerably because in the third quarter mobile video views already represented more than half of the total, with 52%, according to the Global Video Index of that year.
This change in consumer habits forces teams, media and broadcast rights owners to question existing forms of transmission and to propose new tools to broadcast and monetize sports. At the same time it gives them clear and real information about the behavior of the audience. For the first time they have the opportunity to take concrete actions that allow them to increase fan engagement and maximize revenue during the days before, after the event and during the match itself.
In its State of the Media Industry 2018, Ooyala highlights the initiatives that seek to generate new content distribution schemes, among them is Sports Illustrated, the popular sports magazine that took its original programs, documentaries and films to the Amazon streaming service, with the aim of positioning itself among a very dynamic market.
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