NAB 2025: Live sport streaming, TVXRAY, and the Qvest for personalisation
One of the buzzwords we hear from streaming vendors at every NAB is “personalisation.” Often this refers to content discovery, to streaming platforms and EPGs that translate the personal data we’ve provided to them through expressed or demonstrated viewing preferences and saving us from sorting through the endless morass of content choices by foregrounding the shows we’re most likely to want to watch next. It’s a personalised experience because presumably no other viewer is going to see the same content thrust forward when they start searching.
Increasingly, as monetisation in the streaming world becomes ever more ad-centric, and our industry’s primary promise to brands is that we have the data and the underlying tech to push the right ads to the right viewers at the right moment to a degree that linear TV can’t possibly match, we see this term applied to ad decisioning. This is as much a promise to viewers as it is to advertisers; since one of the most appealing perks of cord-cutting in the days when streaming was a more subscription-driven business was the opportunity to leave ad-interrupted viewing behind, our consolation prize to viewing audiences is again to leverage the data we’ve leached out of them to serve up ads for products or services they’re more likely to buy.
One area where we frequently hear about the potential for personalisation but it has possibly proven a more difficult puzzle to solve, given the apparent lack of visible progress is in live sports streaming. Again, this is arguably in one respect a bit of a make-good; as ever more expensive and competitive sports licensing among the various streaming platforms (at least in the U.S.) has turned finding the streaming service that might on any given Sunday happen to be hosting the game you want to see—and then scrimping, saving, and scurrying to subscribe to it before the action gets underway—it’s become incumbent on streaming services to counter the inconvenience of streaming sports market fragmentation (not to mention long-standing latency concerns and some recent, humiliating, high-profile delivery hiccups) with declarations of what sports streams can do that traditional broadcast sports don’t, can’t, and never will.
In a spirited, only intermittently off-the-rails debate at Streaming Media Connect in February 2025 on how the current state of sports streaming and licensing are impacting sports fans, I heard about some tantalising future possibilities from possibilities from folks well-positioned to know. As Joe Caporoso, President of Team Whistle, a DAZN Company laid out an encouraging vision of live sports streaming’s not-too-distant future, “You'll continue to see an influx of other engagement options and tools for fans to use. That can be alt-casts with different games, betting, or polling that takes place in more of an active environment around these games. Looking to an audience that regularly consumes this stuff in a second-screen environment and that is going to be looking for other ways to engage and other ways to consume it versus a traditional way of watching sports, I think the streamers will be more conducive to those types of options, to providing a different, more immersive experience,” Caporoso predicted, particularly with the arrival of “more potential VR/AR integrations and other different technology that's going to be coming down the pipe.”
At NAB 2025 I set out in search of one irrefutable, real-world example of true sports streaming personalisation, an innovative and unique experience that might present a mass-media live sporting event on my screen as it appears on no one else’s.
In a briefing with Qvest Engage Managing Director, Product Tobias Fröhlich, I believe I saw a legitimate contender in Qvest’s TVXRAY SaaS solution (for which Fröhlich is also Product Lead). Touted as “The Gen Z Upgrade for OTT,” this sports personalisation SDK essentially brings a typical second-screen sports experience to the main screen.
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Qvest Engage TVXRAY
During that Streaming Media Connect session, SVTA CEO Jason Thibeault acknowledged that what made broadcast and cable and traditional television great when it came to sports was that “It was always the same, wherever you watched it,” while at the same time asserting that many of today’s viewers—particularly those who weren’t alive or watching sports in linear TV’s heyday—are looking for something more customised.
Fröhlich echoed Thibeault’s point: “Linear tries to be one-size-fits-all,” he said. “But we are individuals and we have our own questions, so we go to the second screen.”
Given contemporary sports-viewing habits, which are often timeshifted, many viewers are watching while maintaining radio silence on the outside world, lest some data source outside their viewing cocoon give away outcomes that in their unique viewing world haven’t happened yet. TVXRAY transports that second-screen experience, where you go to your mobile device to look up relevant statistics, to the TV with a welcome twist: not only does it allow you to look up the stats you want to see on your main screen, but it also timeshifts them to the point in time where you are in the match. As a result, you get answers to the questions you suddenly find you can’t live without, but those answers are utterly spoiler-free.
Timeshifted user-customised stats on TVXRAY
TVXRAY also enables timeshifters who want to catch up to real time more quickly to watch highlights then go to live. Users can even customise the highlights they get to see by setting triggers like when their favorite players score a goal or a basket.
Granted, this may all sound like more of a niche application than, say, VR/AR/immersive experiences, but isn’t identifying, targeting, and reaching a niche (no matter how small) what personalisation is all about?