Pro Cycling & Mosaic Multiview: keeping an eye on every angle
From an early age, I spent many afternoons in front of a TV watching Pro Cycling races. I followed the Spring classics like the Tour of Flanders, Milan-San Remo, and Paris-Roubaix, as well as the multi-week tours in France, Italy, and Spain. I love the interplay between team tactics and individual class that is at the heart of Pro Cycling, and the sport is doing very well in terms of growing its audience over the last decades.
The introduction of live video streaming has been a big help in expanding the reach of the sport; viewers like me are no longer tied to their TV sets. Instead, we can watch the action out in the backyard or on the go. What still grinds my gears is that I can’t follow my favorite rider at all times when I’m streaming. Or when I see beautiful landscapes that I’ve traveled to before, the director suddenly cuts to another view of the race.
With Tiledmedia’s Mosaic Multiview solution, platforms streaming Pro Cycling can fix this, and greatly improve the user experience, including in areas like advertisements. Hop on and learn more below!
A Short Tour of Pro Cycling
Few sports are as approachable as Pro Cycling. Famous riders are happy to interact with fans and the circus travels to major cities and small towns alike. The athletes duke it out on ordinary roads and trails that you and I take to school or work every day, making the sport very relatable indeed.
On the other hand, a typical stage in Pro Cycling is very long. It’s tough to get the full context of the race as a spectator standing along the track, because the riders whizz by very fast, and you probably won’t be able to catch up to them at another point in the race.
This makes Pro Cycling tailor-made for viewing on TV, tablet, laptop, or phone. A director puts together all the different camera angles, switching between them and showing time differences so that viewers have a good sense of what’s going on and what’s yet to come. Examples of commonly used camera angles for Pro Cycling are the head of the race as captured by fixed cameras at the finish line, chasers followed by a camera on a motorcycle, and a helicopter shot of the peloton.
An Uphill Climb
Surely there is no shortage of compelling and diverse camera angles in Pro Cycling, but this does pose a problem. Well over a hundred riders take part in the action in a major race, so directors in the truck have their work cut out keeping the viewers up to date. If I want to keep an eye on my favorite rider throughout the race, I can only hope that they are in the front of the race. Otherwise, I’m out of luck. And if the director employs a split screen, the layout is very rigid. There is no way for me to control what is on my screen. Lastly, Pro Cycling races usually take multiple hours. If other sporting events happen at the same time, I have to switch back and forth, and I may miss out on important action.
The Peak of Personalization
Enter Mosaic Multiview, Tiledmedia’s solution enabling next-generation live streaming. Our patented video player technology lets Pro Cycling rightsholders offer their viewers the most personalized streaming experience yet. With Mosaic Multiview, if one of the heavy-hitters in the race places an attack or gets a flat tire, I can put them in the corner of my screen as a Picture-in-Picture (PiP) and see how the peloton and other riders react in real-time. I can also continue to monitor the time differences between (groups of) riders so that I can see who is catching up, and who is expanding their lead.
It doesn’t matter if there are just five streams available or over 20 – with our tiled-based distribution, a user can always choose their preferred layout on their streaming device. Whether it is a simple split screen, or four main streams with rotating PiPs on the side: if you come up with a screen lay-out, we can support it. Watching Pro Cycling and another sport stream at the same time? No problem, Mosaic Multiview supports streaming multiple sports programs simultaneously, which serves viewers that are interested in a broad range of sports very well.
Viewers will grow to like this way of live streaming instantly. It’s like riding a bike, once they know this solution exists, they’ll never forget how well this works!
Mosaic Multiview supports watching Pro Cycling and other sports at the same time
A Streamlined Process
So I mentioned that our solution efficiently streams these multiple camera angles. The video player only fetches the pixels that are on the user’s screen, meaning that the device does not have to fetch all camera feeds at their maximum resolution. This saves data and prevents buffering at the same time. Mosaic Multiview is well-suited for viewing with mobile data bundles, with viewers being spared unpleasant surprises when they receive their phone bill at the end of the month.
Pro Cycling broadcasters already have been expanding the reach of the sport in a big way, and with Mosaic Multiview, they can further increase their market and enhance the stickiness of the streaming experience. Unlike YouTube’s approach, our solution require no a separate transcode per user. And one set of transcoded streams can serve all types of devices: mobile phones, tablets, set-top-boxes, PC, and even VR headsets – these can all consume the same bitstreams.
Even better, that single set of transcodes will serve all viewers worldwide as Tiledmedia can also provide CDN origin replication. There is no need to perform transcoding in multiple data centers across countries or continents, opening up the road to efficient distribution to many more millions of Pro Cycling fans in the future!
In AD-dition
There is more to Mosaic Multiview than “just” cost-efficiency, scalability, and extreme personalization. Pro Cycling rightsholders can also use Mosaic Multiview to implement next-generation advertisements in live streaming. Our customers can insert ads as PiPs at any place on the screen, the ad can be any size and the user can be enabled to drag the ad around and adjust the size if desired by the streaming platform. PiP ads are less intrusive than pre-roll or mid-roll ads, which decreases number of viewers dropping the stream altogether during ads.
Another advantage for ad providers is that ads can be more targeted: For instance, popping up two small PiPs with an energy drink for one user, and showing a single PiP with an ad for sneakers to a another. Better ad targeting means more revenue and less wasted resources on irrelevant ads. When it comes to live streaming Pro Cycling, Mosaic Multiview gives you the best bang for your buck!
Multiview Streaming Takes Off the Training Wheels
Hopefully, you are as excited for the new Pro Cycling season as I am. If you also see a future with more personalized viewing of all the action, please contact me at glenn at tiledmedia.com.
You can try out Mosaic Multiview yourself by downloading our Tiledmedia Player on Google Play Store or the iOS App Store. It contains Mosaic Multiview content that you can play around with to get a sense of how slick the experience could be.
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Stay tuned!