The following interview is part of our ongoing Expert Series that asks C-level professionals, team presidents, league executives, athletic directors and other sports influencers about their latest thoughts and insights on new technologies impacting the sports industry.
Name: Sung Ho Choi
Company: fuboTV
Position: Co-Founder
Choi is a co-founder of fuboTV, the leading sports-first streaming TV service. He led he team that launched the service in 2015, spearheading the design and development of its initial technology stack on web, iOS, Android, Fire TV, Apple TV and Roku.
Prior to founding fuboTV, Choi was an early employee of SVOD service DramaFever. He played a critical part in growing the company before he left to start fuboTV. DramaFever was sold to Softbank and is now part of Warner Bros. Digital Networks.
1) What utilization of technology in sports has recently blown you away?
Technology is transforming sports in so many ways, it is difficult to choose just one thing that blows me away. VR in sports is certainly interesting, although I don’t see consumer adoption happening any time soon. I’ve seen some non-4K HDR sports videos with 60FPS which seem to be a practical next step for improving video quality, and that excites me; even though we know 4K will eventually be everywhere, it is probably still few years out. Beyond streaming, and not directly related to Fubo, but real time body tracking in the NFL is pretty amazing as well.
2) If money were no object, what technology would you build or buy to help you do your job better?
In the short term I would probably buy a few CDNs and build an even lower latency video protocol and network. We already feel like we are working at light-speed, but we know it needs to get faster to stay ahead of the competition and in-line with customer expectations.
But really, if money was no object, there’s no limit to what we can do. On a start-up budget, we created our own OTT video platform and built out our tech infrastructure from the ground up — and when we recently had our biggest audience ever to watch the Eagles beat the Patriots, we amazingly suffered no outages, had incredible buffering rates, and delivered lower latency than any other live streaming TV service. We take great pride in the fact that due to our low latency, sports fans watching a game on fuboTV will be first to see an incredible touchdown, dunk, home run or game-winning goal … up to an entire minute before our competitors — all which are owned by well capitalized media and tech companies.
3) What does fuboTV’s viewership data for Super Bowl LII reveal about how the OTT service has been able to find success?
What has been transformative with our OTT service for sports fans is being able to track subscription behavior. For a consumer, before the rise of streaming services, you had to plan ahead before watching a big sporting event. OTT has eliminated a major burden from the consumer, who no longer has to call weeks ahead to make an appointment to install a cable or satellite service, then wait at home all day to set up a cable box, only to regret this decision once the cable bill comes. I think being able to tap into the pent up demand — and do so instantly — is where OTT services really have an edge over traditional distribution. And by being able to use data to track exactly how, when and how often consumers are signing up, watching, etc., it makes it much easier for us to act quickly to serve our customers’ needs.
4) If you had to project 20 years into the future, how will sports fans consume content?
It may sound boring, but I believe the majority of fans will still be watching their favorite players, teams and sporting events on their big screen TVs at home. Quality will of course be significantly better as broadband speeds increase and devices get “smarter.” But the main difference between now and 20 years from now will be the delivery method. Also I expect that VR, AR, and holographic displays with more immersive experiences will begin to attract large enough audiences to become commercially viable.
I believe the main shift however will happen in the production of the live events. The cost of producing events will go down dramatically with advancements in technology, enabling personalized sports experiences based on vast numbers of cameras that will be installed to support a single event. I believe within 20 years we will see fully automated or semi-automated live sports production system that would be personalized to your interests and preferences.
5) Give us your bold prediction about OTT services that will be integral to sports in general over the next 12 months and why?
I believe we will start to see externalization of the interface from app and channel based discovery & play initiation to platform based discovery. Similar to what we’ve seen with Facebook and Google AMP, device vendors will begin incentivizing content distributors to push metadata into their own content indexes to allow consumers to discover content more easily. We’re already starting to see that on platforms like AppleTV, Roku, Samsung and LG smart TVs and others that are beginning to expose content from Netflix, Amazon, HBO, ESPN, etc., directly onto their platform. Consumers will be able to discover which apps and channels carry content they want to watch without having to download the applications first.
