Liberty Global helps sports fans follow the moments that matter with automated topic detection
Case study
Sports fans love live games, but they also care about the build-up, interviews, highlights, analysis, debate and follow-up coverage around the sports, teams and athletes they love.
Liberty Global wanted to explore a better way to help viewers find more of this relevant sports content across their existing content library. Together with Media Distillery, Liberty Global developed Follow a Sport, a new viewing experience that allowed customers to follow selected sports, teams and athletes and receive updates when those topics appeared in relevant programming.
Key figures
Powered by Media Distillery’s Automated topic detection, now part of the Sports Engagement Suite, the experience helped viewers discover sports content they may otherwise have missed and jump directly to the most relevant moments in replay content.
The results showed strong consumer appeal.
The Challenge: Helping fans find the sports content they care about
Sports fans are highly engaged, but the content they care about is not always easy to find.
A viewer may know when a major match or race is taking place. But related content is often spread across many different programmes, channels and replay assets. That can include sports news, pre- and post-match analysis, talk shows, interviews, magazine formats, highlights and discussion around specific teams, athletes or competitions.
A clear opportunity for Liberty Global
Much of the content already existed in the library, but viewers needed a better way to discover the sports moments most relevant to them.
The question was whether a more personalised sports experience could help customers find and watch more of that content. Liberty Global wanted to test whether viewers would value a service that allowed them to follow their favourite sports, teams and athletes, and receive updates whenever those topics appeared in programming.
The Solution: Automated topic detection for personalised viewing moments at scale
Liberty Global and Media Distillery worked together to develop Follow a Sport as a proof of concept.
The experience allowed a test group of subscribers to specify the sports, teams or athletes as topics they wanted to follow. When those topics appeared in relevant programming, viewers received updates in their regular TV app. When opening a replay show, they could jump directly to the relevant part of the video instead of manually searching through the full programme.
This made it possible to create useful sports metadata, at scale, from the video content, instead of relying only on generic programme information. The solution identified the featured sports, teams, athletes, and events inside the content.
The sports-specific approach was important. Descriptions need to be useful without spoiling the result. A viewer may want to know that a replay includes Liverpool, Lewis Hamilton, Formula 1, tennis, the Tour de France, volleyball or running, without seeing the outcome of an event before they watch it. Additionally, a 60-second minimum duration threshold was set - to ensure viewers were directed to the most valuable clips that covered a topic in a reasonable amount of detail. Media Distillery’s approach supported spoiler-free topic descriptions and sports-specific tags designed around how fans actually follow sport.
What Media Distillery provided:
The automated video understanding needed to make this possible. Using the automated topic detection within our Sports Engagement Suite (then known as Topic Distillery), we identified sports-related topics, people and moments inside live, replay and unscripted programming.
This was a joint proof of concept designed around a specific product question: would viewers value a new way to follow sports topics across the content they already had access to?
Liberty Global led the vision for the consumer experience and provided the app environment, content access, customer test group and feedback process. Media Distillery contributed the automated topic detection capability needed to identify relevant sports topics inside programming and make those moments usable in the viewer experience. The value of the concept depended on both sides working together.
The Result: Strong viewer approval and award-winning innovation
The proof of concept showed that viewers saw clear value in the Follow a Sport experience. After a three-week test period, users were strongly positive about the service.
The impact
These results suggest that automated topic detection can do more than improve search. It can help create a more personalised and engaging sports experience, encouraging viewers to discover relevant content they might not otherwise have found, including content on channels or programmes they were not used to watching.
The project also received industry recognition. The Liberty Global project was a key factor in Topic Distillery for Sports winning Best Advance in Content Discovery at the 2024 CSI Awards and the IABM BaM Award in the Consume category at IBC 2024.