DAZN’s Sandeep Tiku spoke to Broadcast Sport about what will be next for the broadcaster and the wider industry
“The linear way of watching football on a TV can be very boring. Any game, there are always dull moments.”
DAZN CTO Sandeep Tiku believes that sport broadcast could be set for a major evolution in the next few years, with AI and other new technologies bringing a whole new experience for fans at home - hopefully keeping them from getting bored while watching their team or athlete through hyper-personalised content and interactivity.
Speaking to Broadcast Sport, he continued, “When there’s something exciting, your eyes are stuck to the screen and you don’t need anyone to sell anything. However, when there is a bit of a dryness in the game, you bring in the interactivity and other features, let fans chat and stuff like that. This is what improves their satisfaction.”
This is shown in the features that DAZN has brought in for the World Cup, which have included votes to decide which player a camera should follow, live chats with players, message boards, quizzes, polls and plenty more. Tiku explained, “The idea is twofold. Put the fan at the centre of every experience and and then let them use our products and technologies to create the sports experience that they actually want. This is not only for the World Cup. This is what our roadmap looks like now.”
Several other features are also being brought in to this end, including My Clips, a highlight service currently being trialled in Italy with plans to expand to other DAZN territories. Effectively a “ChatGPT-like” service, it allows DAZN app users to type in the clip they want to see in natural language and it will then search the broadcaster’s archive for it. Tiku said, “Generally we think customers want to watch the top goal, but what we realised is actually sometimes they don’t want to. For example, they want to see when a particular player in this particular season hit the post, not the goal, because they remember this moment.
“The problem is nobody can give that to them. So we basically give them a tool that can scan all the petabytes of videos that we have and bring exactly what customer asks for. All in a fraction of a second.”
Another feature for app users is voting for their favourite athlete, which is then integrated into broadcasts during interviews and graphics. Tiku believes, “It’s not just technology for the sake of technology. It’s technology for influencing the athletes, consumers, and sports community. This is the vision.”
He added, “Our customer is becoming the editorial person on DAZN.”
Tiku expects all of this will lead to a world where, “No two customers will have the same experience on DAZN. This is what we’re working towards on everything. Not just what you’re watching, but if you participate in a poll or a quiz it’s different, etc.. End to end, this is our thinking.”
This is important for bringing in the younger generation, “for them, this is the default,” but Tiku doesn’t think it will turn away older viewers at the same time. “When you tell even elderly people or hardcore watchers that, ‘Hey, here’s Messi coming on DAZN to have a chat,’ they’ll break all barriers to learn the technology needed to be involved.”
This isn’t all that DAZN will aim for, with two other “pillars” that Tiku and the rest of the broadcaster are aiming for. Secondly, “DAZN won’t just be a sports streaming and media company. Globally, DAZN will become a marketplace where anyone, from a rights holder to a small sport content creator, can come to the DAZN platform, make their content available, and the DAZN platform will make it available to the consumer. We’ll connect the consumers and the right holders directly. We’ll become almost like a marketplace.”
Finally, and possibly most interestingly for the rest of the industry, is DAZN’s work on Delta Protocol. While it sounds like a 1980s sci-fi film, it is actually a new transmission method being worked on by the broadcaster as well as Google, HP, AWS and more, which uses AI and other technologies to, as Tiku claims, “reduce costs by 60%-80%,” and “almost put piracy to death.” That’s not all, as he also brings it back to the original idea: “The complex technology that we use to bring all this content in will significantly reduce, and every consumer will have a hyper-personalised experience.” He believes the industry could be using it widely within five years.
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