03 July 2025
The Asset Value of Sports Content. Maximising the Hidden Revenue in Sports through Effective Asset Management.
I began my TV career as a tape librarian thirty years ago. During that time, we manually inputted the videotape information onto physical cards. Thankfully, computerisation and digitisation have exponentially improved the quality and quantity of hardware and software applications available to support content collection, tagging and storage. As a result, there has been a noticeable enhancement in the speed of research and delivery of sports content clips, significantly improving content creators' storytelling capabilities. In the past, I would have a few hours to tell my friends about footage and angles of incidents not available to them but which I had seen in the Broadcast Centre before they were aired on TV, but now, people can access these clips instantly before they have left the stadium!
In today's digital era, sports content has become a valuable asset for organisations, athletes, and fans. From capturing the most memorable moments to reliving historical achievements, the power of sports content is immense. However, effectively managing, protecting, and monetising this content can be challenging. That's where asset management systems come into play. This article delves into the importance of investing in robust asset management systems. We will refer to them as VAMs. Visual Asset Management because they manage all of your optical media, but more familiar acronyms are Digital Asset Management (DAM), Production Asset Management (PAM), and Media Asset Management (MAM). All of them streamline content collection, storage, management, and distribution. By leveraging these systems, sports organisations can unlock the full potential of their visual assets and maximise revenue throughout the content lifecycle.
The Challenges of Monetising Archives:
Sports fans enjoy reminiscing, discussing, and reliving moments of their favourite sports teams, athletes and events. However, managing, protecting, and monetising sports organisations' archives is a problematic business model. Archive monetisation faces three primary challenges.
1. Unpredictable Revenue Sources:
Determining where revenue will come from is often uncertain, posing a challenge for sports organisations.
2. Revenue Prediction Difficulty:
It can be challenging to predict the potential revenue from an archive, making planning and resource allocation difficult.
3. High Cost of Sales (COS):
Collating and organising archives requires significant overhead costs, including the need for dedicated personnel to manage the process.
For instance, the owner of Jude Bellingham's first professional goal would only initially make a short return on their investment. Nonetheless, after his recent outstanding performances for Real Madrid and England, which have increased his exposure and celebrity, the value of that clip would have significantly increased. Suppose his career continues its current trajectory, and he scores the winning goal for England at the Euros or World Cup or a Champions League final goal for Real Madrid. In that case, that clip is a potential goldmine for the content owner. All the investment in storing and protecting it will eventually pay off.
A VAM will reduce COS.
Daily, around 2 to 3 billion digital photographs and videos are shared. Thanks to recent advancements in AI and more accessible editing, uploading and distribution processes, experts believe this number will double next year. The amount of content generated around a single event can be substantial in sports. Fans capture key moments of events such as the World Cup final on their phones and share them instantly or as a compilation later. Similarly, sports organisations and athletes' representatives also produce content at their events. There is so much content being made, and a lot of it is only suitable for the moment and can be discarded, but there will be actions that have long-term value, and the quicker those can be managed and protected, the easier it will be to retain their value. Using AI to speed up the management process (what is stored and what is discarded), a robust VAM will ensure the right content is protected and begin to lay the foundations for building the monetisation strategy.
With the advancement of software technology, providers have lowered the cost of their solutions. Another significant advancement is that some solutions can store all kinds of digital media, such as videos, photos, documents, audio clips, and more, onto a central server that can be accessed on-premises or via a private or public cloud. Organisations transitioning to a single system can effectively reduce the COS, centralise their media and increase their profit margins.
Content Movement During Live Events: Monetizing in Real-Time:
The rise of digital content creators in broadcasting live sports presents a massive opportunity for storytelling. To be successful, there is a need for a centralised hub that allows content creators to access, organise, track and distribute the content quickly and effortlessly.
Currently, most sports organisations and broadcasters separate video, photo, and audio content, which increases the cost of production and limits the ability of producers to access all of the content available for their storytelling purposes. The VAM offers real-time access to video feeds, photos, audio clips, scripts, statistics, graphics, and edited compilations, making more content available and giving producers more choices in how to tell their stories and where to distribute them. This would achieve a broader audience reach and increase engagement and viewership. The Tier 1 sports rights owners, powered by strong media rights revenue, already provide their partners with centralised hubs for content. Still, as the running costs have reduced and by using a centralised system for all content, all sports organisations can now efficiently capture and organise their visual content, and by doing so, they will be able to easily provide that content quickly and effectively to key partners, either free of charge or at a premium.
Powerful Archival Capabilities: Monetising Historical Content:
A well-set-up and maintained VAM system can benefit the creation and distribution of content around live sporting events. Still, its true power lies in its ability to store, manage, and preserve an organised archive. Proper logging, naming conventions, labelling and management (deciding what to keep and what to discard) are required to enable sports federations, athletes, and broadcasters to generate revenue from historical footage, interviews, photos, and other assets. In the past, this required a lot of manual labour, with an army of loggers, researchers, and developers inputting all the data necessary to facilitate searchability and develop the e-commerce requirements for customers to research, pay for, and download specific content.
Advancements in AI technology have and will continue to help with the management of the archive. With so much data being collected, it would be foolhardy and expensive to keep it all. By using AI and ML, companies can introduce automatic content analysis and tagging based on object, facial, and voice recognition. This will significantly reduce the manual effort required for content capture, retrieval and ongoing management allowing for optimisation of monetisation potential. Having all visual assets in one place makes it easier to manage the historical archive. For instance, using the Jude Bellingham example, if it is clear that his first professional goal has become a significant asset, it would be a simple procedure to re-tag and price that goal higher in the search and proceed accordingly, maybe even ensure that the whole match is kept and stored. Using AI, this kind of management requires a minimal workforce, but storing every visual media asset together allows all the images of that incident or match to be managed and priced accordingly. This approach helps solve the Revenue Prediction difficulty (Point 1 above) as organisations can begin to forecast the usage and value of each visual asset, predict its revenue potential and put a value on the whole archive.
Additionally, a cloud-based VAM system offers scalability, data security, backup, and 24/7 technical support that helps the sports organisation grow their archive while reducing on-site support and overhead requirements. Adding cloud-based licensing and distribution access reduces that further. They can increase the size, quality, and availability of their content and support that with an e-commerce platform that is accessible 24/7.
Conclusion:
In my 30+ years working in the sports media industry, I have witnessed extraordinary technological advancements in content capture, data, graphics, virtual production, editing, and distribution platforms. Having started my career as a librarian, I have always appreciated the importance of capturing and protecting content for future use. While Tier 1 sports federations have managed and monetised their archives well over the last decade or so, the reduction in overhead costs, along with the availability of a single solution that can handle all visual assets using AI and operate in the cloud, presents an opportunity for all sports and athletes to create and monetise their archives with ease.
Using content as an asset is a crucial revenue generation tool for organisations and individuals to stay competitive and thrive in the digital age. Installing a powerful and robust Asset Management system is essential to achieve this success.
At LCA, we understand the challenges and complexities of implementing and maximising Asset Management systems. Our expertise lets us advise companies on their set-up, management, and monetisation procedures. Additionally, we can support Asset Management system providers in entering and expanding further into the sports market by leveraging our vast network of contacts.