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Talk 03 : Driving the next era of sports entertainment with innovative UX technology

Apr 25, 2024

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Established as a sister company to Hawk-Eye, Pulselive stands at the forefront of digital solutions for sports. Boasting 16 years of expertise, Pulselive is spearheading the evolution of fan engagement into the next generation. We spoke to Mark Wood, Director of Product Development at Pulselive, about where it has reached and where it is going.

  • Mark Wood

    Director of Product Development
    Pulselive

From Interactive Platform to Digital Content Management

──Could you give us a brief history of the company?

Pulselive was founded in 2007 by Wyndham Richardson. Wyndham, then a media student at university, was an intern at Hawk-Eye and met its founder, Paul Hawkins. They discussed enhancing the fan broadcast experience and this led to the idea of Pulselive offering fans an interactive platform where they could predict game outcomes and actively engage with live sports broadcasts.

In 2008, the business took shape, and myself and other engineers joined to actualize the idea. We delivered our idea at the inaugural Indian Premier League (IPL), the professional cricket league of India, where we built an interactive scoring application integrated into live broadcasts. This marked the initial phase of Pulselive's journey into transforming passive sports consumption into an engaging and interactive experience. We were the first ever Twitter partner (now X), to use social media to push fan interactivity with live broadcasts.

In 2010, Wyndham and his team took leadership roles, steering the company into a slightly different direction. But still very much focused on creating an interactive experience for fans. Shortly after that, the owner of the holding company decided to sell Hawk-Eye and Pulselive to the Sony Group in 2011.

With backing from Sony Group, Pulselive won the contract for the IPL website, at the end of 2011. This marked a turning point, and over three months, Pulselive built a new system for the IPL, expanding from interactive experiences to digital content management.

From there, Pulselive won contracts with the International Cricket Council and World Rugby in 2014. In 2015, we rebuilt our technology, creating the Pulselive Experience Platform for the Rugby World Cup, which is still our technological foundation. We also secured the English Premier League contract, marking the beginning of significant growth.

──What are Pulselive’s key technologies?

The Experience Platform is at the hub of our technologies, powering all of our products. The most recent iteration of the Experience Platform is our new self serve model that aims to transition from highly bespoke solutions to quickly establishing the basic structure of sports websites. By rapidly deploying the necessary sports data, editorial content, and website skeleton, clients can allocate their budget towards more customized, unique elements tailored to their specific needs. This initiative, has received positive feedback.

The second noteworthy technology is Playbook. This is a standalone product that seamlessly integrates with the experience platform. It specializes in delivering highly interactive fan engagement activations, including features like predictors, quizzes, opinion polling, fantasy sports, and dynamic video experiences. Playbook enables our clients to deploy engaging content swiftly, fostering creativity and strong connections with their fan base.

The third is Pulselive ID, our Single Sign On (SSO) Solution that provides a means for users to login to one system and be provided with a shared, secure session within all applications across the desired product suite. To support this, the solution provides the means for a user to register and update their core user information across devices, as well as the means for sports organisations to manage these user accounts through an administration interface.

Pulselive's Fan-Centric Approach, Combining Expertise and Technology

──To build a fan-focused UX, what do you always keep in mind?

When it comes to building the UX from a fan perspective, our primary focus is on understanding what fans are seeking to learn and their experience.

There are two broad categories of fans: those who prefer a more passive engagement, wanting critical and live information presented in a clear and engaging manner, and those who are avid enthusiasts, eager to delve into detailed statistics and gain a comprehensive understanding of the events.

For the first category, the challenge lies in delivering essential information in a concise and engaging manner. These fans desire high-level updates without being overwhelmed with excessive details. On the other hand, avid fans, often described as "lean forward" enthusiasts, seek a more immersive experience. They want to explore every statistic, understand the rationale behind decisions, and dive deeply into the intricacies of the event.

To serve these diverse needs, we aim to seamlessly integrate critical information into the user experience, ensuring clarity and engagement for passive fans. Simultaneously, we provide additional portals and pathways for avid fans to explore more detailed information when desired. The key is to strike a balance, acknowledging that not every fan has the same preferences and ensuring a flexible and tailored experience for all.

──What expertise and technology are in use to increase fan engagement?

In terms of expertise, our journey begins with strategy and insights. We provide valuable insights into what fans are seeking and what engages them the most. This sets the stage for creative design, user experience, and product management process. The teams brainstorm ideas, envision what fans want to experience, and determine how to transform those ideas into visually appealing and user-friendly designs.

We then produce interactive storyboards and experiences that serve as a foundation for testing, iteration, and improvement. During the execution phase, we engineer and inspect through quality assurance in order to deliver the products to the clients. But not only that, we ensure consistency and optimal functionality across a diverse range of devices, striving to provide that premium user experience everyone's looking for.

In terms of technology, it's not about relying on technologies themself, but rather how we strategically apply and leverage them. Ensuring high-quality code, rigorous testing, and well thought out requirements become important. Sport has a very high number of edge cases, all of them demand a deep understanding. So there are lots of cases we have to test. This makes our people not just experts in quality assurance, but also enthusiasts of the sports they're contributing to.

──What kind of collaboration is taking place with Hawk-Eye and Beyond Sports, both of which fall under the umbrella of the Sony Group?

Our collaboration with Hawk-Eye has been long-standing and highly impactful. One notable collaboration involves integrating Hawk-Eye's tracking information into our platforms, providing fans with immersive experiences.

For instance, during events like the ICC Cricket World Cup, we developed a virtual reality experience for mobile applications. Fans could use their mobile devices to experience the match from the batsman's perspective, offering a unique and transformative experience. You can play cricket but very few people will ever get to play in an amazing stadium and get to actually feel what it's like to have a ball coming towards you at high speed.

Hawk-Eye and Pulselive are increasingly working together to build technology and products. This includes close collaboration between engineering teams and the incorporation of cloud-based solutions from Hawk-Eye. From our inception, Pulselive has only used cloud infrastructure, so we are sharing our 16 years of cloud experience, contributing to enhancing Hawk-Eye's offerings.

With Beyond Sports, we are actively exploring collaborative opportunities. The idea is to bring Beyond Sports' virtual recreations into the hands of fans.

Initially, this may involve delivering video experiences, but the ultimate goal is to provide fully interactive experiences for fans. This would empower fans to dynamically alter various aspects of the virtual experience, such as choosing between realistic and characters like Blocky, modifying stadiums, adjusting conditions, and more.

──The role of interactive content is expected to be crucial in the future of sports entertainment. Could you tell us about the current state of technology and service?

We see a shift towards hyper-personalized experiences, tailoring content to each individual fan. And Pulselive is at the forefront of this trend, developing technology that breaks down the fan experience into smaller, customizable elements. This approach allows for content to be recombined, reordered, and remixed, creating a unique experience for every fan.

The key to achieving this level of personalization lies in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Pulselive is using AI to automate content creation, enabling content creators to maximize the value of their work. By automating the process, AI frees up content editors and creators to focus on aspects that require human input, such as opinions and deeper insights into sports.

Furthermore, Pulselive is collaborating with Sony to identify and fill gaps in technology, facilitating a seamless experience for fans from live event capture to content delivery. This collaboration extends into other experiences such as video and understanding and interpreting video content. Hawk-eye can work with us to truly understand what is happening in the match, and what the important points of the match are. With the assistance of AI technologies and computer vision, Pulselive aims to comprehensively analyze matches and highlight crucial moments without manual intervention.

The overarching goal is to bring together various technologies to offer personalized and easily consumable content on any device, ensuring fans have the flexibility to choose how they engage with the content.

From Predictions to Challenges, How UX Technologies are Shaping Dynamic Fan Experiences

──Could you provide some examples of UX technologies and services that increase fan engagement?

I'd like to highlight some recent experiences we built for the Rugby World Cup in France. A standout example is our match predictor, offering fans a dynamic, live interactive platform to predict outcomes for every rugby match. This engaged fans in a lively competition to showcase their rugby knowledge, and it was particularly rewarding for South Africa fans who successfully predicted their team's wins early on.

These interactive experiences play a crucial role in enhancing fan engagement, especially during extensive tournaments where fans might not follow every match closely. By encouraging fans to research and care about even the lesser-known teams, we create a more immersive and comprehensive experience. We've also incorporated features like private and custom leaderboards, allowing friends to challenge each other and intensify the narrative surrounding the tournament.

These successful experiences can be replicated across various properties, providing a consistent and engaging platform for fans across different sports events.

──Could you share some of the outcomes from past projects?

As a general practice, we design our systems to handle millions of concurrent users during major sporting events.

For the Rugby World Cup, we witnessed substantial user engagement, with well over a quarter of a million participants in the predictions. An interesting aspect of our predictor was the pre-tournament predictions, where users guessed the tournament winner, the player with the most tries, and the top scorer. Among the quarter of a million participants, only three individuals managed to accurately predict all three entries, adding an extra layer of excitement to the fan experience.

This dynamic of shared excitement and friendly competition is not limited to rugby. In football, our mobile apps for the English Premier League are pivotal, particularly for “Fantasy Football” enthusiasts, an online game in which you create a virtual team of players from the league and play against each other online. Although Pulselive doesn't handle the back end for Premier league’s “Fantasy Football” App, we contribute significantly to the interactive front-end elements. The number of participants is about 10 million each year.

We are also helping them to build new experiences. So where football will last all the way from August to May, Fantasy also lasts for the exact same time. But you'll tend to find that if people miss a week for any reason, there's quite a good chance they will start to stop playing.

So we have been working with the Fantasy provider and Premier League to help design and build weekly challenges. In this format, users' Fantasy teams reset every week, accompanied by new challenges or modified scoring systems. This way brings a fresh and exciting dimension into the game, keeping even seasoned users deeply involved.

AI and Diverse Content Delivery in UX Technology

──With UX innovation, fan engagement is expected to continue evolving. We'd like to hear your views on the future's prospects and potential of innovative technologies in terms of UX.

There are two things that are going to be quite impactful over the next few years.

The first is AI. The integration of generative AI will revolutionize user interactions by offering a more personalized and tailored experience. This includes the possibility of having an AI companion that engages users, brings new points of interest, and actively contributes to the storytelling aspect of the sports experience. This innovative technology holds the potential to significantly enhance user engagement.

The second one is the diversity in terms of devices and formats that content can be delivered to. The devices that we are seeing today are just that beginning of the journey where those devices will end up. As technology advances, considering various devices and content formats becomes crucial. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets, in particular, are evolving rapidly. The ongoing efforts in both high-end devices for premium experiences and more accessible devices like glasses are expected to be transformative.

These technologies can bring immersive experiences to fans, whether in the stadium, overlaying content on the field, or recreating the live stadium experience at home. Combined with virtual recreation technology and skeletal tracking, it becomes much easier for fans to explore fully realized versions of sports events from any perspective, enhancing the overall user experience.

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