Sony's plan to transform sports for younger fans
Sony Sports is leveraging new technologies to make the fan experience even more interactive.
As traditional sports leagues struggle to connect with younger generations, Sony Sports is leveraging new technologies to make the fan experience more interactive and exciting. Rufus Hack, CEO of Sony Sports, joined TheStreet to discuss how Sony is working with the NFL to capture a younger audience.
Related: Major League Baseball rivals settle long, angry dispute off the diamond
Full Video Transcript Below:
RUFUS HACK: So one of the key focuses for Sony at the moment is how it can drive. The synergistic and symbiotic relationship between different entertainment genres, and Sony is obviously an incredibly differentiated position. Having a significant business within music, within pictures, within gaming, with PlayStation and sports is the area we're really looking to build up to leverage some of those capabilities, because in many ways, sport is sort of playing catch up, particularly to the music industry in terms of some of the digital innovations and how fans are consuming sports content. There's obvious learnings in terms of how we can potentially gamify sports to try and make it more interactive and immersive for younger fans. And so leveraging some of those PlayStation capabilities is really exciting. And it's something we're speaking with many of the leagues about, because whenever I speak to any of the commissioners or the CEOs of the world's top sports leagues, the number one issue that they're focused on is how do I engage younger fans. And I think sport recognizes that if you look at any empirical data, there is probably less participation and there is less consumption of sport amongst younger demos than perhaps our generation. And we fundamentally don't believe that there is anything structural around that. We think that is a cyclical thing because we as a sports industry haven't done a particularly good job of engaging younger fans with these more immersive and participative experiences. So if we can unlock some of those learnings from the other Sony businesses, whether it's music, pictures or PlayStation, to really help to redefine the house, younger sports fans are engaging with content. We think that represents a tremendous opportunity.
These leagues are really struggling with moving forward. How do we engage fans in new ways. And then secondly, how do we start to diversify our revenue profile. So we're not hugely reliant on the big B2B media rights deals. Next cycle and obviously particularly the big U.S. leagues have some fantastic runway of 6, 8, 10 year deals. But during that period, what they're really focused on is how do you create revenue diversification, and how do you start to engage with fans in new ways that potentially provides the opportunity for these businesses, these leagues, to transition from just being B2B businesses which sell media partnerships, and they sell sponsorships to actually almost acting more like FMCG companies, where they build a direct relationship with the fans and then could start to almost commercialize the fan and drive-through lots of different digital products and services. And one of the roles that we're trying to play through collecting world class, low latency data is we can create lots of different we can create from that lots of different entertainment experiences for fans.
So just to give an example, we've obviously through our beyond sports business have provided new ways of fans engaging with sports content through having it through Toy Story IP or Simpsons IP. We're also developing a new product, which we're incredibly excited about, which is called Hawk-Eye, which effectively means that you can simulate the game in real time and make tactical substitutions yourself side by side with the real life game going on. So to use a soccer analogy, you can take off Trent Alexander-Arnold from left back and put on Robertson and play the game side by side with the real life game. To see whether better than the coach in terms of making some tactical decisions. So for us, it's all about this thing of trying to make the sports experience more immersive, more participative and more gamified for sports fans. In order to try and address this issue of engaging fans in the way they want to engage with and consume sports content. And I saw something the other day that said 65% of Gen-Z want to view themselves as content creators, and I think it's up to us now to use data to potentially unlock some of these new experiences on behalf of sports leagues.
