Sony's plan to transform sports for younger fans

The Street

Sony Sports is leveraging new technologies to make the fan experience even more interactive.

Transcript

00:00One of the key focuses for Sony at the moment is how it can drive the synergistic and symbiotic

00:06relationship between different entertainment genres. And Sony is obviously in an incredibly

00:10differentiated position, having a significant business within music, within pictures,

00:15within gaming, with PlayStation. And sports is the area we're really looking to build up

00:20to leverage some of those capabilities. Because in many ways, sport is sort of playing catch up,

00:26particularly to the music industry in terms of some of the digital innovations and how fans are

00:30consuming sports content. There's obvious learnings in terms of how we can potentially

00:35gamify sports to try and make it more interactive and immersive for younger fans.

00:42And so leveraging some of those PlayStation capabilities is really exciting. And it's

00:47something we're speaking with many of the leagues about. Because whenever I speak to any of the

00:53commissioners or the CEOs of the world's top sports leagues, the number one issue that they're

00:59focused on is how do I engage younger fans? And I think sport recognizes that if you look at

01:06any empirical data, there is probably less participation and there is less consumption

01:11of sport amongst younger demos than perhaps our generation. And we fundamentally don't believe

01:17that there is anything structural around that. We think that is a cyclical thing because we

01:21as a sports industry haven't done a particularly good job of engaging younger fans with these more

01:27immersive and participative experiences. So if we can unlock some of those learnings from

01:32the other Sony businesses, whether it's music, pictures or PlayStation, to really help to

01:37redefine how younger sports fans are engaging with content, we think that that represents

01:43a tremendous opportunity. These leagues are really struggling with moving forward. How do we engage

01:50fans in new ways? And then secondly, how do we start to diversify our revenue profile so we're

01:56not hugely reliant on the big B2B media rights deals next cycle? And obviously, particularly the

02:02big US leagues have some fantastic runway of six, eight, ten year deals. But during that period, what

02:08they're really focused on is how do you create revenue diversification and how do you start to

02:14engage with fans in new ways that potentially provides the opportunity for these businesses,

02:20these leagues, to transition from just being B2B businesses, which sell media partnerships and they

02:25sell sponsorships, to actually almost acting more like FMCG companies where they build a direct

02:31relationship with the fan and they could start to almost commercialise the fan and drive ARPU through

02:37lots of different digital products and services. And one of the roles that we're trying to play

02:42through collecting world-class low latency data is we can create lots of different, we can create

02:49from that lots of different entertainment experiences for fans. So just to give an example,

02:55we've obviously through our Beyond Sports business have provided new ways of fans engaging with sports

03:01content through having it through Toy Story IP or Simpsons IP. We're also developing a new product

03:07which we're incredibly excited about which is called Hawk AI, which effectively means that you

03:13can simulate the game in real time and make tactical substitutions yourself side by side with

03:20the real life game going on. So to use a soccer analogy you can take off Trent Alexander-Arnold

03:26from left back and put on Robertson and play the game side by side with the real life game to see

03:31whether you know better than the coach in terms of making some tactical decisions. So for us it's all

03:37about this thing of trying to make the sports experience more immersive, more participative,

03:42and more gamified for sports fans in order to try and address this issue of engaging fans in

03:49the way they want to engage with and consume sports content. And I saw something the other

03:56day that said 65% of Gen Zers view themselves as content creators and I think it's up to us

04:02now to use data to potentially unlock some of these new experiences on behalf of sports leagues.

04:12you

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