European streaming platform OneFootball has struck a new deal to distribute Premier Sports’ broadcast content from Spanish LaLiga, Liga Portugal and Germany’s DFB-Pokal.
The three-year partnership with Spanish LaLiga—which includes elite clubs such as Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atlético Madrid—specifies that highlights of all 10 gameday matches become available via the OneFootball app. The contests can also be viewed on the OneFootball website.
In addition, OneFootball will livestream selected games from Liga Portugal and the popular DFB-Pokal knockout cup competition. For the remainder of the current 2022-23 season, fans paying £1.79 per game will have digital access to teams such as Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund and RB Leipzig in the DFB-Pokal or Benfica, FC Porto and Sporting CP in Liga Portugal.
The deal with Premier Sports—designed to appeal to OneFootball’s young, expansive user base in the UK—is similar to the company’s recent deal to stream Italian Serie A matches to Britain and Ireland, as well as another partnership with Sky Deutschland to disseminate livestreams of Bundesliga 2 in Germany. The Argentine Football Association also signed a deal in March that allowed OneFootball to produce original editorial content for the federation.
Considered Europe’s top soccer media platform, Berlin-based OneFootball produced over 15,000 livestreams and on-demand content clips in 2021. The company raised $300 million in Series D funding in April to help launch blockchain-centric OneFootball Labs, with a focus on fan engagement through digital tokens. Animoca Brands and Dapper Labs were among the investors.
Premier Sports has a subscription base of 16 million homes in the UK through Sky and Virgin platforms and is available also via the Premier Player or Amazon Prime. Its free-to-air sister channel, FreeSports, is ensconced in every home in the UK.
Metaverse provider Immersal Oy, a subsidiary of Finland-based Hexagon, has developed an augmented reality platform for horse racing tracks that creates a 3D fan experience before, during and after races.
Through a mobile device or AR glasses, spectators at participating tracks can use the AR to find their seats, to view real-time racing stats and analytics, to gain background on horses and for animated gamification. Immersal’s AR can also be integrated into each race track’s own mobile app.
Powered by multi-access edge computing servers, which speed up the response times of AR content, Immersal’s app operates on 5G. In June, the company launched a personal metaverse app, and the racetrack solution is an immersive outgrowth of that.
Acquired by Hexagon in 2021, Helsinki-based Immersal specializes in spatial mapping and visual positioning applications, keys to metaverse experiences. The company has created similar AR solutions for other sports such as hockey and other venues such as Noevir Stadium in Kobe, Japan.
The San Antonio Spurs will offer automated cocktail bars from TendedBar for fans at AT&T Center this upcoming NBA season. The implementation includes facial recognition and digital age verification from TendedBar to process alcoholic drink orders in the arena.
Fans typically scan a QR code on TendedBar’s machines to use their smartphone to upload a selfie and photo of a government-issued ID, so that TendedBar can confirm a fan’s age and identity before placing a drink order. TendedBar’s cocktail bar units contain touchscreens for fans to customize their own cocktails, which TendedBar automatically mixes for serving.
AT&T Center will offer TendedBar though Aramark Sports + Entertainment, the arena’s hospitality partner. TendedBar has also been deployed at the PGA Tour’s AT&T Byron Nelson and Farmers Insurance Open tournaments, NFL stadiums TIAA Bank Field, Allegiant Stadium, and Empower Field at Mile High, and Formula One’s Aramco U.S. Grand Prix in Austin, Texas.
Vijay Singh, a three-time major winner, became the first pro golfer to use a deWiz swing tracker in a PGA Tour-sanctioned event. Notah Begay is expected to become the second at the SAS Championship this weekend.
Competing in the Furyk & Friends tournament on the Champions tour, Singh wore deWiz during practice and for all three rounds of the tournament. Singh is an investor in the company, which has received permission from the PGA Tour to be worn on the course in stealth mode, meaning it collects data but does not provide its signature haptic feedback. Earlier this month, deWiz announced a Series B round of nearly $4 million.
The initial post-tournament analysis indicated that Singh’s swings on the course were 6% faster with 1.3 inches less backswing than when he was on the range. On several of his worse shots, the deWiz data indicated that Singh dropped his hands more and had a faster backswing. Singh finished the Furyk & Friends one-over par, which was tied for 43rd place.
English Premier League club Liverpool FC is partnering with Meta to sell digital merchandise in what is the first virtual sports team apparel available for paid purchase on Meta’s Avatars Store. Digital versions of Liverpool’s home and away kits are being sold for $1.99 each via the Avatars Store on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. The kits will debut later this year in virtual reality for Meta’s Quest headsets.
Liverpool will receive a cut of the digital merchandise sales, which includes two red LFC-branded hoodie and sweatpants outfits in addition to the home and away jersey kits for a total of four available outfits. The virtual fashion items will be available to users in the U.S., UK, Canada, Mexico, Thailand, Spain and Italy. Cryptocurrency is not an accepted form of payment for digital avatar swag in the metaverse from the social media company formally known as Facebook.
“We’re thrilled that Liverpool fans can now use our Avatars to express their digital identity through the iconic colors and logo of their favorite club,” Jerry Newman, Meta Director of Media Partnerships, Northern Europe, said in a statement. “We’re also excited to help Liverpool begin to tap into the new metaverse economy, with digital apparel revenue that will be incremental to the apparel sales the club generates in the physical world.”
The NFL partnered with Meta around Super Bowl LVI to release branded Rams and Bengals digital shirts and helmets, but those avatar fashion items were available for free. “Our intent is to develop a marketplace where [digital] jerseys or shirts can be sold,” Meta’s Director, North America Sports Partnerships Rob Shaw said in April at SportTechie’s State Of The Industry conference. “There will be a business model where the monies can go back to the leagues and teams or whoever owns the IP.”
Fenway Sports Group-owned Liverpool joins fellow EPL club Everton and LaLiga club Real Betis as top soccer teams to sell virtual avatar fashion, though Real Betis and Everton’s items are for avatars on Fancurve that is separate from Meta’s various platforms. Earlier this week, Meta announced new accessories to workout in virtual reality and its new Quest Pro headset that will retail for $1,500. Meta also announced that its virtual avatars will be gaining legs starting next year.
Longtime Rugby World Cup sponsor Mastercard has debuted an audio-embedded Player of the Match trophy at the ongoing women’s World Cup in New Zealand. The financial company says it’s the world’s first sonic trophy, and speakers in the trophy play audio from the match via fans mic’d up in the stadium, as well as stadium atmosphere sounds and match broadcast commentary.
A new trophy is given to each player who wins the Mastercard Player of the Match for the tournament’s 26 games running through Nov. 12. Mastercard’s on-site team compiles and edits the audio during matches before awarding the trophy once the match is over. Mastercard worked with local cultural experts such as Māori fashion designer Nichola Te Kiri to design the trophy, which also blends melodies that pay homage to ceremonial traditions of the indigenous Aotearoa/New Zealand people.
“The trophy’s cloak-like shape, color and patterns represent a woman’s responsibility/role as a leader and her connection to her landscape,” Te Kiri said in a statement. “With the sonic element providing a commemoration of each match, I am truly privileged to pay homage to these outstanding athletes and their individual and unique narratives.”
Mastercard became a founding global partner of World Rugby’s Women in Rugby program in 2021. The company is also in its 25th year of sponsoring MLB.
The Israeli Basketball Association is enlisting Pixellot’s artificial intelligence technology to stream an equal amount of its men’s and women’s basketball games across eight separate leagues.
Through the partnership, Pixellot’s automated game streams can be viewed on the IBBA’s basketball platform, and Pixellot will also simultaneously become an official sponsor of the Israeli youth basketball leagues. Pixellot’s unmanned cameras automatically track player and ball movement, allowing the company to produce and disseminate as many as 150,000 games per month across over 70 countries.
Pixellot most recently expanded its sports video production technology throughout Canada after striking an August deal with the streaming app HomeTeam Live. But this new deal with the IBBA is closer to home for the Israel-based company and purportedly makes the IBBA the first basketball league to broadcast men’s and women’s leagues equitably.
Pixellot raised $161 million at a $500 million valuation earlier this year to move into Asia and Latin America and has spent much of the past two years developing Pixellot YOU, an AI platform that uses machine learning to record youth games and practices and then distribute automated highlights.
The IBBA has also made youth basketball a priority, particularly for female players. The league has 50 Israeli women’s and girls’ teams and, in recent years, has routinely televised women’s national and first division games on OTT platforms. Overall, the IBBA has 2,360 teams and 35,000 female and male players.
In Europe, FC Barcelona has also capitalized on Pixellot game streams. In the U.S., the NBA and MLB utilize Pixellot technology to livestream youth and college-centric events, while ESPN, Genius Sports, NBC’s SportsEngine and the National Federation of State High School Association have been Pixellot partners.
Vieww, the Bundesliga’s provider of its Video Assistant Referee (VAR) and Goal Line Technology (GLT) solutions, has received FIFA certification for both systems, joining Hawk-Eye Innovations as the only vendor with those dual licenses from the federation.
FIFA granted Vieww its certification for the VAR system prior to the 2022-23 season, and it is in place for both Germany’s top league as well as Bundesliga 2. The majority owner of Vieww is Sportec Solutions, which is a joint venture of Deltatre and the DFL, which is the German governing body for soccer.
Vieww was included in the first cohort of FIFA’s Innovation Program, which was announced in May 2021. Sportec Solutions is also Bundesliga’s provider for match data.
NESN will livestream Boston Bruins and Red Sox games in 4K/HDR, becoming the first U.S. regional sports network to show NHL and MLB games in that video quality within its own streaming app. Cloud media delivery company Akamai Technologies has partnered with NESN to facilitate the bandwidth for 4K/HDR streams on the NESN 360 streaming service.
The high-quality video is initially only available for all home game streams for the Bruins and Red Sox. NESN, which is owned by Fenway Sports Group, launched its regional direct-to-consumer streaming service in June for cord-cutting fans in the New England area to watch Bruins and Red Sox games, marking the first streaming offering of its kind from an RSN. A subscription to NESN 360 costs $29.99 per-month or $329.99 per-year.
NESN 360 debuted 4K/HDR during Red Sox home games this past MLB season and will extend to Bruins home games starting Oct. 15. New England-based fans can stream NESN 360 via their iPhone, Android, Apple TV, Fire TV and Google TV devices.
Predictive analytics company nVenue has launched an NFL micro-betting product and also added fantasy sports guru Matthew Berry to its advisory team.
The Dallas-based nVenue, a graduate of the Comcast Sports Tech Accelerator, had its national debut this summer as part of Apple TV+’s Friday night MLB broadcasts, powering pitch-by-pitch probabilities. Its AI models use historical data and live inputs to produce predictions in less than a second, and now an NFL product is available to media companies and sportsbooks via its NextPlayLive API.
Berry, a longtime ESPN analyst who recently joined NBC Sports, will advise nVenue on product development and help showcase its predictive markets through his content.
The latest Next Gen Stat produced by the NFL and Amazon Web Services is Coverage Classification, an identifier of team passing defensive tactics.
There are eight man and zone pass defenses included in Coverage Classification. The metric is computed using AI algorithms constructed by the AWS Machine Learning Solutions Lab that draws on the player tracking data gleaned from the Zebra Technologies RFID tags on every player’s shoulder pads. More than 60,000 passing plays from the past four seasons were included in the training data set.
The development of Coverage Classification was inspired by a submission to the NFL’s annual Big Data Bowl. Earlier this week, the league announced the fifth edition of the Kaggle-hosted, AWS-backed analytics contest. This year’s theme is calls on data scientists to analyze pass blocking and pass rushing.
