From gamification to personalization: sports media, Web 3.0 and the desire for the ultimate fan experience

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this essay is to explore the ramifications of Web 3.0 on sports media and the desire for the ultimate fan experience.

Design/methodology/approach

The essay explains how Web 3.0 will influence (1) the social TV experience, (2) the drive for zero latency in sports streaming, (3) the desire for exclusive sports memorabilia and experiences, (4) artificial intelligence-driven content and (5) the potential decentralization of certain elements within the sports media ecosphere.

Findings

The core fan experience will still be recognizable, but AI, VR, blockchain and other elements will be infused within it.

Originality/value

Ramifications on sports media scholarships are offered.

Citation

Billings, A.C. (2024), "From gamification to personalization: sports media, Web 3.0 and the desire for the ultimate fan experience", International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSMS-06-2023-0121

Most who know me will indicate I’m a technology innovation skeptic. That is probably an apt moniker to ascribe to me. Sometimes, my skepticism paid off; shifting sports content to three-dimensional programming in the mid 2000s was, indeed, too much stimulation and caused nausea for many viewers. Other times, I have found my instinct to be accurate enough but failed to draw the proper conclusion. For instance, over a decade ago, I adopted a fatalistic view on Twitter. The platform seemed to lack a viable path to profitability while developing characteristics increasingly resembling a dystopian hellhole. As it turned out, many regarded these qualities as features, not glitches and Twitter tarried on.

Nevertheless, I find myself bullish regarding the promise and ultimate potential of Web 3.0 to expand and redefine aspects of the sports media space, particularly via aspects of personalization and gamification. Since there is no widespread agreement regarding how Web 3.0 should be operationalized, I would contend that in the sports realm, the most promising elements that most could classify under the umbrella of Web 3.0 would be personalization, immersion, decentralization and artificial intelligence, which is consistent with most mainstream iterations (see Hackl et al., 2022). Certainly, more elements could be extrapolated upon with sporting applications, but for the sake of brevity, I will focus my interests therein. More specifically, I will articulate the core of my optimistic view by exploring how Web 3.0 will influence (1) the social TV experience, (2) the drive for zero latency in sports streaming, (3) the desire for exclusive sports memorabilia and experiences, (4) artificial intelligence-driven content and (5) the potential decentralization of certain elements within the sports media ecosphere.

Social TV > second screen

One reason why Web 3.0 holds more promise than the infusion of social media pertains to the elements of social TV that are facilitated. Whereas social media is centrally second-screen dependent, it rarely directly complements the sports media product exclusively. The difference between the second screen and the more appealing (for sports media afficionados) social TV is key.

As opposed to merely using multiple screens simultaneously (typically a passive consumption screen combined with an interaction screen), social TV pertains to real-time, primary screen–related backchannel communication during a television broadcast (Lim et al., 2015). In such a context, watching the game while checking your email is second-screen usage, but watching the game while discussing it with your friends is both. The result is a sports media experience that is simultaneously narrower and richer. Within a sporting context, social TV is powerful as it has been found to (a) bridge social capital, (b) enhance perceived sociability and (c) bolster perceived social presence (Brown-Devlin et al., 2021).

Here is where the entry of Web 3.0 thrives in the sporting context. Previous iterations of mobile and interactive media represented large amalgams of content, both sport- and nonsport-related. A scroll through an Instagram feed may have been driven by something like pre-game sports motivations; however, the experience is inevitably infused with other aspects of one’s feed that may not relate to the game and instead focus on other aspects of culture and modern life. This limited social TV facilitation to roughly one-third of all second-screen interactions (Kramer et al., 2015). In contrast, Web 3.0 is many things, yet it can be overarchingly described as immersive. From in-game betting to virtual reality to personalization of sports, this captivation remains the common thread in which one can drown out the “noise” of the media experience to fully engage with a desired product, such as a sports media broadcast.

The quest for zero latency

If there are two sectors of the entertainment industry that drive technological advancement and overall innovation, it would appear to be an odd coupling: sport and pornography. These obviously have very little in common content-wise, but there is a dynamic among their consumers that becomes a shared touchstone: each has avid, potentially addicted fanbases that are constantly interested in improved technological experiences. More specifically on the sports side of the equation, one will find ample evidence of a desire for even more to love from an experience, whether that involves expanding the FIFA World Cup to 48 nations, adding a 17th game to the National Football League or extending league news and events to the point that there’s rarely an “off season.” However, technology and the insatiable desire for more ways to enjoy sports have merged even more in the age of mobile media, namely in the rapid expansion of fantasy sports (see Billings and Ruihley, 2013), sports gambling (Dwyer et al., 2019) and larger sports gaming initiatives (Newman et al., 2022). What is better than watching the game? Side bets and ancillary virtual games, seemingly.

Next on the docket clearly appears to be an extension of Web 3.0, namely the facilitation of the gamification of sports via in-sport/live betting options. As much as people can bet on all sorts of aspects of a live sporting competition, one aspect that alludes pertains to truly live betting. The reason is fairly simple: there is a latency between when the game actually unfolds and when the sports media consumer at home sees it. You cannot bet on whether Stephon Curry will make his pair of free throws if someone is getting to see what happens several seconds before another. Even milliseconds can matter. As witnessed in Lewis’ (2015) best seller Flash Boys – where Wall Street brokers minted billions by having access to a changing stock price milliseconds before the public – there is ample room for corruption in the gambling space if someone has demonstrably more information than the other, even if that information only comes in a split second before.

Web 3.0 makes the drive for zero latency much more of a mandate than a desire, particularly in the sports and gaming spaces in which people seek to react to the same content in the same manner with the same equality of success, whatever the demand might be. Paramount within the sports world is the concept of universal fairness. This, of course, can rarely be achieved, as the chances of a below-average-height athlete being a professional quarterback, for instance, are exceedingly low. Moreover, in the United States of America if one is less than six feet tall, they have less than a one in ten million chance of making the NBA; if one is seven feet tall or more, that chance plummets to one in ten. Meanwhile, Web 3.0 gamification – gambling, fantasy sports, personalized games and more – becomes the field leveler for those seeking a “fair chance” in the sports world. If one endeavors to study hard enough, one presumes they can master such applications, something that does not always seem reachable for athletic skill due to physicality and physiology. There’s a reason that Seinfeld’s George Costanza imagined himself a more than capable general manager of the New York Yankees and never pictured himself actually playing: the understanding of sports success feels dramatically more attainable than the enactment of sports success.

NFT's: sport and the marketing of exclusivity

Non-fungible tokens or NFT’s, are also key to understanding elements of Web 3.0. While their popularity extends far beyond the sports world specifically, the acquisition of sports memorabilia in the form of NFT’s has become a game in its own right. Sports fandom has a core function of exclusivity. Fans have continually always had a desire to display the depth of their fandom as uniquely better than others. In the past, that may have been the possession of an autograph, a picture with a famous athlete or unique stadium access. All of those still hold to some degree, yet each of those earlier functions of exclusivity resulted in mediators between the fan and the desired experience, whether that is the collector seeking to turn a profit on an autographed ball on eBay or a team or league regulating who has access to unique fan experiences.

Web 3.0 arguably shifts this equation as well. Yes, NFT owners can be collectors and seek to manipulate the marketplace for financial gain, but athletes now have far more pathways to directly connecting these experiences with a fan because NFT’s are, by definition, one-of-a-kind – and yet athletes can facilitate as many of these one-of-a-kind images as they desire. In a similar vein, applications such as Cameo represent much more meaningful exchanges, on average, than the experiences that a text-based platform like Twitter could offer. While fans may find it appealing for an athlete to “like” or even “comment” on something that is posted, it appears to be a richer experience when, for a fee that the athlete determines, they can receive a multi-minute video message that is personalized to you and other aspects of your specific life.

Artificial intelligence: your team, your way

A pivotal element of Web 3.0 in the year 2023 was the introduction of OpenAI’s Chat GPT and, quickly thereafter, GPT-4. Most ramifications pertained to elements outside of sport, such as whether this form of artificial intelligence could pass the bar (yes, it would, with flying colors) or whether it could write a college essay (perhaps if one was seeking a middling grade and the instructor was not checking for fact fabrication). However, the desire to personalize Chat GPT and other forms of AI quickly ascended to the forefront of discussions. For instance, some conservatives found Chat GPT-4’s content to be too liberal (Thompson et al., 2023), quickly building an experimental RightWingGPT.

Of course, the ability to personalize artificial intelligence to the needs of sports fans is one potential application with myriad possibilities. Indeed, the media diets of sports fans are increasingly specialized, often resulting in eschewing mainstream media outlets in favor of more team- and player-specific content in social media channels (Lewis et al., 2020). Combine this with the long-held belief that sports journalistic content is the most formulaic (and hence, most easy for technological replication; Rowe, 1999), and the ramifications of AI become abundantly clear. For instance, one could have their fantasy sports team roster input into such an AI system and receive a detailed game report not only of who scored and how but also with a sense of evolution of the game over time, replete with alternating win likelihoods at various points. Moreover, AI will likely soon facilitate the culling of massive amounts of niche data. Those struggling to keep up with the seemingly uncountable number of podcasts about FC Barcelona may find their answers in the AI aggregation of common themes for a macro-level podcast. After all, most AI (including Chat GPT-4) is currently not built on aspiring to a sentient state but rather on the far more attainable task of next-word prediction, sifting through billions of content forms to determine what the proper next word (and, ultimately, next sentence and next paragraph) should be (Mearian, 2023). Currently, niche sports media is prevalent to provide content for smaller segments of fans with an interest in stories and issues outside of the mainstream. For example, YouTubers have built specialized markets for diagnosing injuries witnessed while consuming sports media, using replay and expertise to best assess the situation from afar. Aggregating such content via artificial intelligence could not only result in a blending of the “best of” these diagnoses but also in more accurate assessments of that sporting situation.

Decentralizing sports media: promises and pitfalls

One area that appears to be a double-edged sword in regard to the ramifications of Web 3.0 in sports media pertains to the ability to decentralize it. These efforts have been going on for quite some time, with mixed effectiveness. For instance, in the live streaming space, the ability to control one’s own video content dissemination has been effective in spaces like YouTube Live, where Felix Baumgartner attracted a then-record eight million live streamed viewers during his 2012 skydive (Plunkett, 2012) or on Twitch, where esports participants can not only cultivate their own content for fans (Rogers et al., 2022) but also where a “narrative economy” (Newman et al., 2022, p. 241) can be built on principles of self-determination (Qian et al., 2022). Those elements of the sports media world will only evolve and further proliferate in the future.

Nevertheless, the desire to decentralize the most mainstream sports media content offerings is likely to face a more perilous road. In 2015, the application Periscope was acquired by Twitter, at least partly because it threatened the sanctity of pay-per-view sports; many championship boxing or Ultimate Fighting Championship matches were attempted to be offered free to fans via attendees with a smart phone and a Periscope account. These efforts were quickly thwarted (in minutes, if not seconds) by sports media rights holders. Periscope pivoted to offering “behind the scenes” coverage of sporting events, which was a much more crowded space. It was ultimately discontinued in 2021, citing declining usage and unsustainable maintenance costs (Gartenberg, 2020).

Such is the conundrum with decentralizing the most desired live sports content: when billions of dollars are at stake, there is concentrated power to thwart renegades. If anything, sports media content is moving to be more centralized, spurring the possibilities of Web 3.0. As just one example, the sports journalism world found that many of its most prominent journalists were hired away not by other news media outlets but by sports teams and leagues themselves (Mirer et al., 2018). In doing so, the boundaries of sports media inevitably shifted (Mirer, 2019), but it was in the direction of the corporation, not the masses. Hence, the prospect of decentralization of sports media seems to inherently be a mixed bag.

Conclusion

I have attempted to use this essay to show the possibilities and, in some cases, the limitations of Web 3.0 in sports media spaces, particularly with correlates related to personalization, immersion, decentralization and artificial intelligence. As much as the dramatic and dynamic aspects of Web 3.0 garner headlines and many a social media discussion, it may be the small tweaks to the sports media experience that have the most permeating influence on sports fan experiences. I recall once interviewing Dallas Mavericks owner and technology investor Mark Cuban, who discussed virtual reality not as a mainstream way to place a fan at the courtside of a key game but nearly as much as something where a simple turn of the head to check on a score can be accomplished without impeding an interpersonal interaction (Billings, 2016). A less invasive and annoying form of Google Glass, so to speak. This seems like an apt example as we more fully emerge into a sports world surrounded by Web 3.0 influences. The sports fan is always looking for another edge or another way to bolster – even if slightly – the game experience. The core fan experience will still be recognizable, but AI, VR, blockchain and other elements will be infused within it. As the EA Sports tagline asserts, it’s in the game. So, too, will be Web 3.0.