South by Southwest is an event that caters to interactive digital companies, so it should come as no surprise that media business’ biggest disrupters were the ones that had the biggest presence in Austin, Texas, last week.
YouTube posted with bigger presence than previous years, setting up shop in the first floor of an office building. Twitter worked out of a rented house for a week. Amazon built a large downtown set, primarily to promote its “The Man in the High Castle” series. Snapchat executives were spotted around town celebrating the company’s recent IPO. Netflix threw one of the biggest bashes of the week.
“These weren’t one-and-done parties like some of these other media companies,” said Justin Ching, a supervising producer at Fox Sports, who attended the event. “These are companies looking to own the entire week down here.”
Though SXSW launched a sports component in 2014, complete with sports-focused panels during the day, sports media companies have not invested in the week as much as other digital companies.
“Our No. 1 product — live sports — has continued to be a little more invulnerable to digital disruption,” Ching said. “There’s a lot of hype around sports, but sports is one of those places where technology adoption is slower than in a place like music. Sports hasn’t had to reinvent itself like music has in the last 10 years.”
As has been the case at most sports media events over the past several years, the sports-related technology that brought the most buzz dealt with virtual reality/augmented reality and wearable technology, according to sports business executives who attended SXSW.
“You couldn’t shake a stick without hitting another VR test area,” said ESPN NFL business analyst and MMQB columnist Andrew Brandt, who was on a panel at SXSW that was bullish on the future of legalized gambling in sports.
Figuring out how to program content for and around wearables was another common theme during the event.
“Media companies are looking to sell into that and see that space as another screen to create for,” Ching said.
Bill Squadron, special counsel for Genius Sports and a professor at Columbia University, agreed.
“The use of biometric data to tell stories about various kinds of sports certainly has gotten some attention in the past couple of years,” Squadron said. “We are moving into a new world. Nobody really knows what the ground rules are going to be five years from now.”
— John Ourand
