The data insights company is extending its focus beyond betting to sports producers and broadcasters
Data insights business IMG Arena, which focuses extensively on the sports betting market, is accelerating its push into sports streaming, data-driven broadcast graphics, analytics and insights, following a number of recent company acquisitions.
These include a strategic investment in Swedish computer vision specialist Signality.
Broadcast Sport caught up with IMG Arena president Freddie Longe at Sportel to find out what the plans are for widening the core focus of the company.
He said: “We create upstream data in any sport and the downstream user cases for this are broader than just betting, as all this data drives deeper fan engagement. The challenge is to simplify the data into metrics that are easy to follow and understand, separating out the noise from the genuine insights.”
The model for Longe is to “put all the data in one place” for betting and broadcast companies to utilise and derive what they need out of it.
IMG Arena is one of three verticals of IMG Media, which includes IMG Production and Premier League Productions, so it’s well placed to potentially leverage existing relationships within IMG.
As Longe explains: “We are already producing all this data, so the question is how can we help elevate that in broadcast? We have the network to produce that elevation, and are seeing that model working already, with the DP World Tour golf. We provided DP World Tour with a front-end experience that enables them to use the data for broadcast, betting and officiating as well.”
“This is our direction of travel,” he adds. “We made a couple of acquisitions, including Signality, and these have enabled us to give clients volumes of data that will continue to provide more innovations downstream.”
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