Summary: 

  • Sports fans consume content in different ways and on many platforms, making it difficult for brands to reach them. 
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) solutions can accelerate workflows, streamline content management, and create new ways to engage with fans. 
  • Veritone Sport has a collection of offerings that help sports brands engage with fans in wholly new and powerful ways throughout the year. 

In the first blog in this series, we covered the challenges that many sports organizations face with their media asset management practice. We explored how AI can help overcome these hurdles and ultimately unlock downstream revenue opportunities. In part two, we talked about how AI can help facility operators increase fan safety and situational awareness, provide insights into on-site incidences, and optimize their energy consumption to lower their carbon footprint.

In this final installment, we’ll dive into the importance of year-round fan engagement to drive brand recognition and audience growth. To achieve this, we’ll showcase the different ways sports organizations can use AI to reach these fans wherever they are both physically and digitally. 

How Sports Fans Consume Content Today 

Sports fans today consume content in a cross-platform way that makes it difficult for brands to reach them without investing in different types of short-form content. In fact, 41% of global sports fans stream live sports through digital platforms, while another 80% use a second screen while watching a live sports broadcast. 

Millennials, now the largest generation in the United States, are 40% more likely to use social media to track down information on their favorite teams and players. In addition, 32% of all sports fans use social media, with another 35% using the internet at least once a day to check scores, read reports or news, watch videos, and play fantasy sports. So how exactly does AI help sports brands reach these fans where they are consuming content? 

Increasing Fan Engagement with Artificial Intelligence 

In a recent survey with sports fans, they identified 13 different platforms they use to consume content, including TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and more. However, the vast majority opt for YouTube for highlights. With video receiving 38% more engagement than photos, short-form video is a ripe avenue to reach sports fans worldwide. 

The speed at which the world moves, surfacing and packaging up content, particularly video, has historically been an end-to-end manual process. But that has now changed with AI as a means to process video in media archives, tagging it with accurate metadata so that sports brands or interested parties can source content faster. That means finding content to use in near-real time after it’s been ingested into the archive, editing it as needed, distributing or providing access to partners, and pushing it out on these different platforms to reach fans with relevant content. 

To help accelerate brands’ fan engagement efforts, we’ve built solutions on top of Veritone aiWARE, a hyper-expansive Enterprise AI platform, to continue our support of the sports industry across multiple solutions with Veritone Sport. Veritone Digital Media Hub, an AI-powered asset management and monetization solution, automates content tagging and sets them up for downstream use cases, including fan engagement and content monetization. 

In addition, Veritone has been a longstanding leader in the content licensing business. Providing white glove service and access to archives of sports content across multiple rights holders, including the NCAA, USTA, French Open, Pac-12, Big Ten, and more. We’ve supported Nike, Disney, Under Armour, and AT&T campaigns as well as feature films, documentaries, countless ESPN 30 for 30s, and many more.

With advances in AI voice technology, also called deepfake or synthetic voice, new opportunities to engage with fans have emerged. The language barrier is one area that AI can solve that often gets overlooked. To truly reach a global audience for international sports or to break into new markets that don’t have as strong of a presence abroad as they do in their home country, AI can help break down these communication barriers at scale. 

Reaching and Engaging with a Global Audience Using AI Voice 

English and Mandarin Chinese are two of the most spoken languages in the world. But if you consider there are only 1.5 billion English speakers worldwide, nearly 20% of the world’s population, that leaves another 80% of the world that sports brands in the English-speaking world might not be reaching today. 

That’s why Veritone partnered with Stats Perform to provide play-by-play commentary in various voices and languages. With a global audience of millions of sports fans worldwide, sports brands now more than ever need to offer content accessible to audiences wherever they are consuming it. 

But AI voice can do more than break down language barriers. It can also open up the opportunity to create personalized communications from players or a brand ambassador to fans in one’s synthetic voice. It can also be used to bring back legacy voices or scale past sports personalities, from commentators and pundits to broadcasters, to reach fans in a nostalgic way. 

Veritone Voice offers that capability, providing 300 stock voices in over 150 languages. And with our custom voice services, we are working with the likes of Alan Smith, a famed sports broadcaster and former footballer, to create unique voices that fans can engage with to enhance their watching experience. 

Contact us today to learn about our entire sports portfolio, including content licensing services, media management, monetization, or any of the solutions mentioned above. 

Learn More About Veritone Sport

 

 

Further Reading: 

How An AI-enabled Digital Asset Management Platform Helps You Maximize The Value Of Your Content 

A Look At Artificial Intelligence And Overcoming Bottlenecks In Content Supply Chains 

How An AI Ecosystem Unlocks Unexpected Capabilities and Opportunities