The Mediating Role of Interaction Between Watching Motivation and Flow of Sports Broadcasting in Multi-Channel Network

This study aimed to grasp the structural path to watchers’ flow by applying watching motivation to multi-channel network (MCN), which is spreading as a new sports broadcasting medium and to emphasize the role of interaction in MCN. A survey for the MCN users over the age of 19 participating in sports contents was conducted. Results showed that among watching motivation factors fun, host appeal, and content appeal had significant positive effects on interaction in sports broadcasting of MCN. Interaction was also found to have a positive effect on watchers’ flow. In the relationship between watching motivation and watchers’ flow, it was shown that fun, host appeal, and content appeal had significant positive effects on watchers’ flow by a partial mediating effect of interaction. The watchers’ flow through interaction is expected to result in sustainable participation behaviors in sports broadcasting of MCN.

Smart Director: An Event-Driven Directing System for Live Broadcasting

Live video broadcasting normally requires a multitude of skills and expertise with domain knowledge to enable multi-camera productions. As the number of cameras keeps increasing, directing a live sports broadcast has now become more complicated and challenging than ever before. The broadcast directors need to be much more concentrated, responsive, and knowledgeable, during the production. To relieve the directors from their intensive efforts, we develop an innovative automated sports broadcast directing system, called Smart Director, which aims at mimicking the typical human-in-the-loop broadcasting process to automatically create near-professional broadcasting programs in real-time by using a set of advanced multi-view video analysis algorithms. Inspired by the so-called “three-event” construction of sports broadcast [ 14 ], we build our system with an event-driven pipeline consisting of three consecutive novel components: (1) the Multi-View Event Localization to detect events by modeling multi-view correlations, (2) the Multi-View Highlight Detection to rank camera views by the visual importance for view selection, and (3) the Auto-Broadcasting Scheduler to control the production of broadcasting videos. To our best knowledge, our system is the first end-to-end automated directing system for multi-camera sports broadcasting, completely driven by the semantic understanding of sports events. It is also the first system to solve the novel problem of multi-view joint event detection by cross-view relation modeling. We conduct both objective and subjective evaluations on a real-world multi-camera soccer dataset, which demonstrate the quality of our auto-generated videos is comparable to that of the human-directed videos. Thanks to its faster response, our system is able to capture more fast-passing and short-duration events which are usually missed by human directors.

Mediapro: reconversión de un carrier en grupo global de comunicación

The transformation that the Spanish company Mediapro has undergone from its beginning as carrier to become a global communication group –the first in Spain by net income– is studied. Mediapro is one of the largest European producers and one of the largest broadcasters of world sports broadcasting rights. Starting from an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses and an in-depth study of its industrial diversification policies and its business results, as well as its corporate reputation, closely linked to corporate behavior, the text also investigates some of the keys to its future as a large media conglomerate, subject to an extraordinarily competitive sector and in full digital transformation. The conclusion is that in a business context in which it must compete with the world´s largest content producers, as well as with the large holders of sports broadcasting rights, this future must necessarily go through less dependence on sports rights –subject to a fierce negotiation with large global conglomerates– and, at the same time, for a clear reinforcement of its corporate reputation. Resumen Se estudia la transformación que ha experimentado la empresa española Mediapro desde sus inicios como carrier (transportador de señal) hasta convertirse en un grupo global de comunicación –el primero de España por ingresos netos y ebitda–, además de una de las mayores productoras europeas y uno de los mayores difusores de derechos de retransmisiones deportivas mundiales, y que opera en numerosos países. Partiendo de un análisis de las fortalezas y debilidades de Mediapro y de un estudio profundo de sus políticas de diversificación industrial y de sus resultados empresariales, así como de su reputación corporativa, íntimamente unida al comportamiento corporativo, el texto indaga también en algunas de las claves de su futuro como gran conglomerado mediático, sujeto a un sector extraordinariamente competitivo y en plena transformación digital. La conclusión es que en un contexto de negocio en el que debe competir con las mayores productoras de contenidos mundiales, así como con los grandes poseedores de los derechos de retransmisiones deportivas, este futuro debe pasar necesariamente por una menor dependencia de los derechos deportivos –sujetos a una férrea negociación con grandes conglomerados mundiales– y, al mismo tiempo, por un claro reforzamiento de su reputación corporativa.