“Our deal with Snap will bring in a whole new demographic into watching sporting content,” says Hutton. “We’re really pleased that Snap have made that big decision to get involved in sport in Europe, through us and through the Games.” Hutton points to Eurosport’s The Commissioner of Football with Eric Cantona, and The Commissioner of Tennis with John McEnroe – both created in the past 12 months – to give an idea of how short-form content can work within sports. He says: “They’ve been really viral, shareable content that takes sports events to a much bigger audience, and also transforms our image along the way.” Hutton continues: “If you look at the ways in which we promote and push the Games content, we could easily just say that we’ll do it in a traditional way, through traditional mediums, but we wanted to engage
“Using AR in our Eurosport Cube allows presenters to convey their opinions and analysis by pointing, touching and feeling as opposed to sitting behind a desk” PETER HUTTON
with external partners to create a bigger story.” When Discovery initially made its deal with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), it committed itself to bringing the Games to more screens and more people than ever before, and partnerships with modern, up-and-coming technology companies such as Snap offers the potential to engage with the next generation of viewers. “Snap allows us to hit a different audience, as well as our advertisers,” explains Hutton. “With the generation that uses Snap, we want to increase their potential to move up to watching live sports because I think you need to look after that next generation coming through and permanently push people to watching the live sports experience.” EXPERIMENTING WITH THE FUTURE For Eurosport, the Olympic coverage isn’t simply about finding new avenues and platforms – it’s about advancing the established ones too. The broadcaster will bring what it is calling the ‘Eurosport Cube’ to PyeongChang this month, and Hutton hopes it will offer AR in a way never seen before. “In experimenting with Olympic Sports over the past 18 months, one of the things we’ve found really interesting is the ways in which you can utilise the technology available to you,” says Hutton.
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