The best sports streaming experiences are built backwards
Every significant technology project I've been involved in has started with the same question. Or at least, it should have. Not, "What technology should we use?" but, "What experience are we trying to create?" It's a subtle difference, but it completely changes the outcome.
The sports industry loves technology. Every conference is filled with discussions about artificial intelligence, cloud production, personalisation, augmented reality, and whatever the next breakthrough happens to be. The innovations themselves are genuinely exciting and many will change the industry over the coming years. Yet I've sat through countless meetings where the conversation starts with the technology rather than the problem. "We've got this new capability." "We can now do this." "What could we build with it?" They're understandable questions. They're also usually the wrong ones.
The best projects I've worked on have always started somewhere completely different. They start at the finish line. They begin by imagining what success looks like for the fan, the broadcaster, the athlete, or the production team. Only once everyone agrees on the destination do you start thinking about the technology needed to get there.
It's a principle that sounds obvious, yet it's surprisingly easy to forget. Technology naturally captures our attention because it's tangible. We can demonstrate it, benchmark it and compare it with what came before. Experiences are much harder to define because they're emotional. They're about how people feel rather than how systems perform.
But sport has never been driven by technology. It's driven by emotion. Nobody remembers the bandwidth available during a World Cup final. They remember where they were when the winning goal was scored. Nobody talks about the infrastructure behind a broadcast. They talk about the interview that made them see an athlete differently. Technology creates the opportunity. Experience creates the memory.
One thing I've learned over the years is that the organisations delivering the most memorable experiences are rarely those with access to the most technology. They're the ones that are crystal clear about the problem they're trying to solve. I've seen modest budgets produce extraordinary results because everyone involved shared the same vision of what success looked like. Equally, I've seen hugely ambitious technology programmes struggle because the conversation became dominated by specifications, features, and architectures before anyone had properly defined the experience they were trying to create.
This isn't just a lesson for engineers or production teams. It applies equally to boardrooms. Investment decisions often begin with discussions about platforms, infrastructure, or the latest innovation. Those conversations are important, but they're rarely where the real value lies. The organisations that consistently move the industry forward tend to ask a different question first: what will be better for the fan because we've done this? Once you have a compelling answer, the technology becomes far easier to justify, prioritise and, ultimately, measure. The differentiator isn't access to technology. It's clarity of purpose.
That's why I sometimes worry that our industry spends too much time discussing capabilities and not enough time discussing outcomes. Artificial intelligence is a perfect example. Almost every panel discussion asks the same question: "How will AI change sport?" I'm far more interested in a different one: "What experience do we want to improve?" If AI helps a production team spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time telling stories, that's valuable. If it makes content easier to discover or improves accessibility for fans around the world, even better. The technology matters because the experience matters, not the other way around.
The same principle applies far beyond AI. Every decision, whether it's about production workflows, fan engagement, venue technology, or digital platforms, becomes much simpler when you work backwards from the experience you want people to have. Do you want supporters to feel closer to their club? Do you want viewers to understand the tactics better? Do you want production teams to tell richer stories? Once those questions have been answered, the technology often becomes remarkably obvious.
Too often we reverse the process. We build something because we can, then spend months trying to explain why people should care. That's rarely how meaningful innovation happens. The technologies that genuinely change industries are usually those that solve problems people already have. They remove friction. They make something easier. They create possibilities that weren't there before. The technology itself quietly fades into the background.
In many ways, that's the greatest compliment innovation can receive: when nobody notices it. Because when technology disappears, all that's left is the experience. Perhaps that's why the projects I've enjoyed most throughout my career aren't the ones with the most impressive technical specifications. They're the ones where people simply walked away saying, "That was brilliant." Not because they understood how it worked, but because they didn't need to. They simply enjoyed the result.
Maybe that's the question we should ask more often as an industry. Not, "What can this technology do?" but, "How do we want people to feel?" Everything else should follow from there.