Discovery Sports Events Takes UCI Track Champions League to the Metaverse

The UCI Track Champions League, a partnership between Discovery Sports Events and monitor biking physique UCI, is again for a second season of short-format racing throughout a number of worldwide rounds. This time, nevertheless, the elite competitors may even happen within the metaverse.

The match kicks off this month with six fast-paced, two-hour race programmes scheduled for primetime Saturday evenings throughout consecutive weekends. The format was designed to reinvent monitor biking and simplified to interact followers globally and options Dash and Keirin for the Dash Championship, and Elimination and Scratch for the Endurance Championship. That is the second iteration of the occasion, with the inaugural November 2021 season proving a hit after months of planning amid Covid restrictions.

“Season Two has come around very quickly,” says Scott Younger, SVP content material and manufacturing at Warner Bros. Discovery Sports Europe. “It’s been a busy and very successful year for our company. Discovery Sports Events creates owned and operated content that we can curate as a concept to work with sporting federations like the UCI, to convince them to trust us with very important properties like track cycling. The focus of it is serving up really rich live sports content to an engaged audience, and finding new ways to engage with an audience that would not typically come and look at track cycling.”

“There was genuine shock, awe, surprise and pleasure when the first season rolled out,” he provides. “I was in the middle of the arena watching those athletes who have been in this sport for a very long time, genuinely thrilled by what has been conceived and what they are now part of. There’s no better endorsement.”

“We’re looking at new ways to satisfy the track cycling fan base but also enlarge that fan base,” says François Ribeiro, head of Discovery Sports Events. “The product we’re going to deliver this year is very much in line with what was shown in Season One. It’s a high-intensity and high-quality product when you experience it at the event, but also on screen. This year we’re pushing the boundaries on the technology side. All the data from the riders – power, cadence, speed, heartbeat – will be available not only on the app but also at the venue on the LED screens around the perimeter of the track, so that any spectator or viewer can see how the riders are performing and the data that is being delivered.”

“The biggest innovation will be the metaverse preview that we’ll have in London,” he provides.

This can be a VR ‘access all areas’ expertise for the ultimate leg of the championship in London and is the results of a partnership between Discovery Sports Events and tech and leisure firm Infinite Actuality (VR).

“We will be the first [sports production] to offer 100% of the broadcast feed we produce in the metaverse. There will be more than 10 TV feeds available; that’s not just the world feed and the onboard feed, but also a camera on the UCI referee, a camera on the live director in the OB van, and a camera on the show caller, to offer an immersive experience and a [greater] level of access to fans. They will see content that’s never been available before. We see it as a perfect complement to what we are providing on linear, digital and social media.”

The preview expertise will probably be accessible on iPad or PC, however Ribeiro says improvement work is ongoing to permit the third season subsequent yr to be skilled by way of VR headsets and related know-how.

“We will be the first [sports production] to offer 100% of the broadcast feed we produce in the metaverse”

“This expertise will already supply a stage of entry that has by no means been seen earlier than within the sports activities business. We now have the distinctive market place of being the promoter of the TCL, we management the format of the occasion and we do the manufacturing of the occasion, the printed and distribution. We personal all of the media and business rights globally, so it’s fully as much as us to outline what we wish to embrace in that metaverse expertise and outline the foundations of the sport when it comes to authorisation to any third occasion.

“Our two prime objectives have always been the same across our business: improve the way you engage with your existing fan base, and how to enlarge it. We see the metaverse as having the potential to meet both those objectives.”

“The metaverse and Web 3.0 is new to most of us,” he provides. “We’ll be the laboratory for the rest of the group.”

Dwell occasions

For every spherical of this yr’s UCI Track Champions League, Warner Bros. Discovery’s protection will start with 30-minute preview exhibits as pleasure builds forward of the night’s motion with half-hour of study and rider interviews rounding off every broadcast after the dwell monitor biking.

Worldwide protection will see the occasions broadcast dwell on discovery+, GCN+ (globally) and the Eurosport app in addition to on Eurosport 1. Warner Bros. Discovery channels, Quest (UK), Kanal 9 (Sweden), 6’eren (Denmark), Max (Norway) and Kutonen (Finland), will run highlights exhibits after every spherical whereas Germany’s free-to-air Eurosport 1 channel will broadcast dwell protection of every spherical.

“Our two prime objectives have always been the same across our business: improve the way you engage with your existing fan base, and how to enlarge it. We see the metaverse as having the potential to meet both those objectives”

“NEP provides the [OB] facilities, but the people and the ideas, and execution of all that, is all internal,” says Younger. “There are 23 cameras that we use for protection. With the addition of the numerous different cameras that we put round [the production] and the cameras which can be there doing unilateral content material for our channels, which might feed again into the match protection, that rises to round 30.

“I don’t think it’s about the number of cameras anymore. It’s about how engaging you can make that sport. Sport is the last bastion of appointment to view – everything else is downloadable or streamable on YouTube. The fact that it’s only live once is the best thing about sport. If you’ve got engaging content, you’re connecting with the athletes and you’re finding new ways to bring a new generation through metaverse, that’s the way you make your sport highly relevant.”

That goes for audio too

“If you go back and watch [the footage] from Mallorca in Season One, the noise from that maximum capacity crowd when that event started, with the bell ringing, was phenomenal,” says Younger.

“I’ve always paid a great deal of attention to audio,” says Ribeiro. “With most other sports, I would love to hear more of the audio of the event and have a better balance with the audio of the commentators. With this event, we are in a position to define the audio. We don’t put microphones on the riders, but we have a lot of mics in proximity to them, to record what they say, capturing the dialogue between riders in between races. That was [obvious during] the docuseries we produced around Season One [Back on Track]. So gaining the trust and confidence of the athletes, to get so close to them, has proved to be [beneficial] for our production.”

Athletic pursuits

“We’re in a very exciting time,” says Ribeiro. “A year ago we were just out of lockdown, and ten days before the first event in Mallorca was the first time I had met the entire Track Champions League team of 140 people, all together. Until then we had only been collaborating over Zoom.”

“There are far fewer unknowns in Season Two,” he provides. “We have a great stadium team. We know what we are going to deliver. The greatest satisfaction is to see the level of engagement of the riders themselves. They have a far greater understanding of how we work and what they can expect from the Track Champions League, for their personal benefit, to raise their profile, to score UCI points, and as part of their Olympic journey. So, we are definitely much less stressed than during Season One, but the excitement is still very much the same.”