BROADCAST + OTT

With no live sport to watch, organisations have had to adapt –and unsurprisingly, plenty have turned to eSports to fill the void.

With the 2020 calendar decimated by coronavirus cancellations, Formula 1 hosted its first ever virtual Grand Prix, featuring an eclectic mix of drivers past and present, celebrities, and eSports pros. Nearly 300,000 viewers saw Renault test driver Guanyu Zhou beat the likes of Chris Hoy, Ian Poulter and Liam Payne to the checkered flag.

League Two side Leyton Orient created a real online buzz when they launched the ‘Ultimate Quran-Team’ Fifa tournament, attracting 128 teams from around the world –helping make headlines and millions of viewers for the club, showing organisations don’t need to be the size of Real Madrid to achieve cut-through. This virtual approach has also been seen in NFL’s Madden tournament and Nascar’s iRacing series (both streamed live on Fox Sports), and LaLiga, who also held a virtual tournament with one representative from each of their clubs. Over one million people took in the event live, won by Real Madrid’s Marco Asensio, which helped raise over €140,000 for coronavirus-related charities. Real has also launched a Twitch channel to continue to engage with a new gaming-focused audience too.

Aside from gaming, the ATP Tour has launched the world’s first officially branded virtual tennis product –aimed at the sports betting market. Featuring official logos, the computer generated tournaments will fill the gaps in the tennis calendar, while providing betting opportunities for punters to take on.

Without action to show, broadcasters have had to be creative –and fill huge haps in their schedules.

Vintage matches appears to be the order of the day, with ITV announcing they will show the entirety of Euro 96 on their channels in lieu of the postponed 2020. BBC has been delving into their archives to bring classic Matches of the Day and ‘live’ streams of memorable tournament games.

Fifa has begun to show iconic World Cup matches via its own channels, and has opened its archive to its worldwide broadcast partners, while Tennis TV and the Olympic Channel have set up new dedicated channels featuring past moments.

Other broadcasters have had to expand their usual offerings –ESPN and BT Sport have been showing ESPN’s acclaimed ‘30 for 30’ documentaries, while Sky Sports has been focusing on longer features alongside archive matches.

With no live sport on, much paywalled content has been made freely available, with NFL’s Game Pass, and NBA’s League Pass subscription services open free of charge to users in the US and internationally. Sky has also offered customers the chance to pause their Sky Sports payments until the action resumes.

One of the more interesting broadcast developments was ITV’s Grand National coverage, where instead of leaning on past footage, they showed a simulated virtual race. Along with imagining how the 2020 Grand National would have fared, the broadcaster used CGI technology and special algorithms to imagine a head-to-head race between legends Red Rum and Tiger Roll..

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