Fans forward: creating lean-in engagement with personalised next-gen sport streaming experiences
Summer 2026 provided “one of the biggest live sport moments of the decade” in the FIFA World Cup, according to Keith Belford, Wurl’s general manager for EMEA, in a recent guest post on the Streaming Media Europe blog. It also provided valuable lessons on how to maximise reach with today’s sport audiences, which for rightsholders and streaming platforms means delivering “360-degree” next-gen experiences that reward and engage fan interest rather than taking it for granted.
Today’s fans, Belford says, “do not only want the 90 minutes. They want highlights, previews, reactions, documentaries, archive footage, analysis, social conversation, and shoulder programming. They want to engage before, during, and after the event, often across multiple platforms. The challenge for sport brands is to build distribution strategies that reflect that behaviour.”
Essential to meeting this challenge is recognising that different fans want different enhancements to the traditional linear sport experience. One fan wants advanced analytics or tactical analysis; another wants enhanced commentary; another wants live interaction and shopability; yet another wants player-specific highlights. All fans seeking such lean-forward enhancements want to see these elements at the point they are in the game.
A growing number of sport fans prefer to stream in multiview mode, an option available on more and more platforms. Some want to take over the tech director’s chair and watch multiple angles on the same match, while others want to track all of the concurrent games they’ve placed bets on. And with the globalisation and exploding international appeal of many sports, fans want localised broadcasts customised to their region and play-by-play and commentary available in their preferred language.
While many of today’s sport streams remain as linear, lean-back, and traditional as the fans who enjoy them, next-gen platforms are increasingly delivering individualised sport experiences: customisable commentary tracks, fan-selected camera angles, in-game ecommerce, personalised graphic overlays and statistics, and even AI-generated highlight reels tailored to individual interests. What are the production and technical hurdles of creating individualised and interactive experiences from a single live event? How are today’s forward-facing platforms making personalisation feel natural rather than overwhelming? And how effective are these new engagement features in attracting younger, digital-native fans whose expectations and tastes are shaped by social rather than old-school linear TV?
Though sport is arguably the last bastion of live appointment viewing associated with traditional broadcast TV—not to mention an area where latency issues and more caused streaming to struggle the longest to deliver experiences on par with broadcast and cable—old-fashioned, no-frills linear broadcasts feel increasingly outmoded to today’s fans (and not just to younger ones). Expectations created by content consumption on mobile devices cast an ever-longer shadow over what users want from sport programming.
As Synamedia fellow software engineer Avi Fruchter says, viewer tastes now demonstrably favour “swiping over zapping,” referring to the vastly larger range of possibilities presented by smartphone “swipes” compared to the “zaps” of point-and-click TV remotes. Swiping can deliver instant access to “an iconic moment in every swipe,” he contends, as opposed to a click that takes you to the beginning of a show or an event or deposits you wherever the action happens to be in the case of live TV.
This article will explore many of the emerging trends in lean-in sport streaming in our swipe-infused world, as well as how leagues and streaming platforms measure the type of engagement these features are designed to deliver, with insights that capture “true” engagement and behavioural metrics that extend well beyond viewing time.
Multiview and Choose Your View
A great deal of the transformation of sport streaming experiences is propelled by technology innovation like the rise of multiview, the ability to deliver customised stats in real time, and the insertion of relevant, contextually appropriate ads in new formats that share the screen rather than interrupt the action. Meanwhile, a lot of the innovation in sport content comes from clippers, creators, and influencers, bringing new players into the mix with smaller footprints and outsized impact and moving sport-derived entertainment ever further than traditional, linear match-viewing.
Multiview offers more than “choose your own adventure” autonomy to viewers, its proponents argue. It addresses a fundamental shortcoming of traditional sport broadcasts that provide a necessarily narrow, single-narrative view of the varied action happening in a match. As Miska Hannuksela, Nokia’s head of video research, wrote in a recent guest post on the Streaming Media blog, “Sport tells a thousand stories, [but] viewers are accustomed to seeing just one version of the event, which we call the ‘director’s cut.’ While commentators, pundits, and replays all valiantly attempt to fill in the blanks, what’s broadcast around the world is ultimately just a small piece of the story.”
Multiview, Hannuksela says, changes the picture by “splitting the screen into multiple, smaller, simultaneous viewing boxes,” which enables viewing audiences to “watch several streams at the same time.” Broadcaster-curated multiview is nothing new, he notes, but the real breakthrough for today’s fans is what he calls “single-player multiview,” which puts the viewer in the director’s seat. The single-player approach personalises the multiview experience, allowing viewers “to engage on a deeper level with the live events they love by moving beyond a fixed perspective while maintaining frame-accurate synchronisation between camera angles.”
Single-player Multiview (image courtesy of Nokia)
Despite all of the industry buzz around multiview—and the proliferation of multiview-enabling technologies and solutions in the streaming world—its appeal and applicability are anything but universal. And while adding a selected feed or angle to the main broadcast and manipulating their multiview mix may make some viewers feel like producers, others might prefer a facile “set it and forget it” approach that resembles traditional linear viewing as much as possible. At a stand on the show floor at NAB 2026, one vendor described this seemingly contradictory desire to curate the viewing experience and at the same time enjoy a passive, hands-off entertainment experience as “lean-back interactivity.”
With many fans, this might be a difficult balance to strike to deliver experiences that meet a complex set of user expectations. As Sanjog Gupta, CEO of the International Cricket Council, says, nothing “delivers scale and passion like sport. But the entry gate needs to be so low that every fan you have can be on your journey.”
Rob Koenen, founder and chief business officer of Tiledmedia, a Netherlands-based streaming player provider specialising in delivering customisable and immersive multiview experiences, concedes that multiview isn’t a natural fit for every sport viewer—or even every sport. “There is obviously already a lot of demand, as we see with what YouTube is doing with multiview,” he says. But he argues that “where multiview really shines” is in “multi-ball” sports like golf or in racing events, where there are so many potential areas of action where the viewer might want to direct their attention. But it’s less compelling in “single-ball” sports, where the action is more centred on one focal point.
Multiview Formula 1 viewing
“Formula 1 has started to offer multiview, and it’s really a different type of engagement with the content,” Koenen says. Letting the viewer choose multiple viewpoints in a racing environment “allows you to add your story to that of the director. Cycling is popular in Europe as well. It might be a city marathon where the director has to make choices and they’re not necessarily the choices you would make because you have your favorite rider. They may be at the back of the pack of the starting line, but you don’t want to replace the amazing story that a director is telling. And let’s face it, these stories only get more amazing as we go, because they’re adding drones, as we’ve seen with the Olympics. But often, you do want to be able to add your story without losing sight of the main feed. It’s being your own producer without losing the power of the official director or the official production. You can’t replace it, but you do want to add to it. That’s where multiview shines best.”
Multiview cycling on Tiledmedia
Koenen adds that sport betting and times when multiple contenders are playing and vying for league championships are other instances where multiview has a key role to play. “Multiview is suitable for if you want to keep an eye on multiple bets that you’ve got out,” he says. “If your teams are in competition and you want to keep track of multiple games at the same time, then it’s also a useful tool to be able to switch back and forth.”
Agentic Sport-Streaming Hyper-Personalisation
Pete Scott, chief strategy officer at interactive sport monetisation platform Play Anywhere, foresees an era when lean in-inclined sport viewers can keep a hand in tailoring their streaming experiences while being much more physically hands-off than they are now. While celebrating “the ability to create a multiview personalised stream” at markedly reduced costs via currently available offerings like Tiledmedia’s, Scott believes that one day, viewers will be able to do so via “an agent sitting on your TV set [that] already knows what to go and grab.”
Scott notes that Play Anywhere is currently working toward that sort of agentic interaction and agentic-enabled interactivity on the ecommerce side of sport streaming. “We’re doing interactive overlays,” he says. “And because we understand that you want to order a pizza at 2:00 [when you’re watching] the 1:00 game, we’ll talk to that agent, and the pizza will be delivered.” Through the same agentic automated technology, “you’ll get your stats and your video clips for your favorite players. I also think the folks of TGI Sport who are doing dynamic virtual signage and scoreboards are going to get to a point where each household will have their own signage through the two blue lines that you see with hockey.”
Scott contends that all of these innovations are part of the “inevitable hyper-personalisation” that viewers will be able to construct in “how you want to orchestrate and watch your games.” With multiview’s move into the mainstream, he says, “you’re just seeing the first signals of that, where people want to construct their own personalised experiences.” Eventually, he explains, “it’s going to be one to one in each household” when it comes to individualised sport streaming experiences.
Standing Out Amongst the Clippers
One area where AI’s impact is already apparent in the tailored content viewers can consume that augments or even supplants the linear match-viewing experience is customised clipping, where fans enjoy near-instant access to curated or customised highlights on DTC apps, social, and other platforms.
Scott describes dedicated “clippers” who provide clipping as a service to emerging sport leagues that are looking to increase their visibility and grow their audiences by “getting highlights out to the biggest influencers.” These providers are “becoming very, very popular because those clippers have the audiences. You pay them $100,000, you give them the content, and you say, ‘Let ’er rip.’ ”
“Given the volume at which clipping is happening, and the volume at which creators are becoming creators solely on the backs of clipping and cranking out clips like a factory,” Joe Caporoso of DAZN-owned Team Whistle asks, “how do you differentiate the content that’s coming out of it? It starts to look a little bit like AI slop, and it could easily get lost.”
For Team Whistle, with its focus on creating sport-centric, social-first content for Gen Z and Millennials, the challenge is to sustain a comparable pace of content generation while maintaining the quality and distinctiveness of its offerings amid the morass of mass-produced content. “How do we use our own tools, and how do we use third-party individuals and creators to better move really fast like you can with clipping, but also better differentiate the look and feel of what we have everywhere?” asks Caporoso.
Betting on Ultra-Low Latency
As much as clipped and remixed content has become a popular, or even primary, way of enjoying sport for a rapidly growing number of fans, so has betting—widely legalised throughout the UK and the EU and largely legitimised, despite some inevitable controversies—become an integral part of the game experience for a large portion of the fan base. So even as the old complaints about streaming latency versus broadcast (e.g., “I just heard my cable-watching neighbour cheering for the goal I haven’t seen yet in my stream.”) don’t come up as often now, the latency conversation has resurfaced around betting.
But as Tiledmedia’s Koenen contends, the key issue for levelling the betting playing field isn’t latency so much as sync. “Sometimes it’s more important to keep people on the same live edge than to keep the live edge close to what’s really happening,” he says. “As long as everybody is in sync 20 seconds behind, it’s fine.” When it comes to Formula 1, for example, “they don’t really seem to care about latency because it’s way behind what’s happening, and nobody cares. I think it’s overrated.”
AI/ML-driven sports highlights generator WSC Sports
But the good news, Koenen says, for those who absolutely need to minimise latency is that “there are lots of technologies that can lower the
latency to single-digit seconds or even less.” He concedes that in countries and regions where betting, prediction, and other types of gamification and live interaction are more central to fans’ sport streaming experiences than in the Netherlands, lower latency can be critical.
Play Anywhere’s Scott predicts a near future when betting and prediction market vendors like Polymarket will be “streaming sports inside their apps.” Acknowledging that prioritising and ensuring ultra-low latency has historically been “cost prohibitive,” he says that with the next-level integration of betting and sport streaming, “there’s going to be an audience that’s willing to pay a premium to have more synchronisation between the bets and the actual video. Polymarket has found a loophole where they’ve created 5,000 types of predictive markets on their platforms, and they’re seeing that sport is the biggest driver of consumption.”
Measuring Next-Gen Sport Success
Given the growing emphasis on lean-in experiences in sport, where fans are interacting with streams rather than simply sitting back and watching a linear feed, new questions around measurement arise. To measure the success of these streams and, in particular, the innovations they deliver, it’s not enough to calculate watch times or simply identify the raw number of viewers. To measure the ROI of these new features and innovations, it’s essential to track how much viewers are actually using and responding to them.
When it comes to tracking engagement with multiview sport experiences, Tiledmedia’s Koenen reports, a wealth of data and insights on user behaviour has become available. “On a much more technical level, we can actually see how people interact with the video,” he says. “We can see if they use the multiview, which of the cameras they choose, how long they stay on them, how often they swap the video. Of course, it’s up to our customers, who are obviously B2B, to take that data into their marketing and into their evaluation of the product.”
DAZN's Caporoso cites a number of key questions to ask to inform these more relevant KPIs: “Are they physically commenting? Are they sharing the content? Are they purchasing something? Are they registering their information with us? Do we have their email address? Do we have their location? Are they exploring the app and following the user journey that we map? Those are things that we’re trying to spend more time with,” he says. “Anything that shows signs of a more active viewer than a passive viewer who just has it on in the background potentially—those are the more and more valuable things. For the brand lift studies that we do, that’s becoming more front and center for the metrics that we spotlight.”
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