The fragmented sports broadcast landscape: Why accuracy is everything

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For better or worse, the modern sports fan has never had more ways to watch their favourite events.

From traditional TV broadcasts to regional streaming platforms, geo-blocked services, and pop-up channels, the landscape has become a complex mosaic that is extremely tricky to get a firm handle on.

While abundance offers choice, it presents a significant challenge for industry stakeholders – particularly sports betting content sites – who rely on pinpoint accuracy to maintain user trust and integrity.

Maintaining a clear, accurate, and consistent view of which broadcast partner is showing what, where and when, is not only difficult; it’s a mission-critical, full-time operation. This is precisely the problem the Televised & Streamed Sports (TSS) service is able to solve.

Piecing together a global puzzle

The core issue here is fragmentation. What was once a relatively simple matter of listing a game being shown on a major channel has spiralled into an intricate jigsaw puzzle in every corner of the world. A single high-profile match might be split across multiple broadcasters, even within one territory. Streaming giants like Amazon Prime might secure a selection of specific games, while other fixtures in the same competition remain on traditional pay TV.

This issue is compounded by a series of factors:

Regional rights: The same competition is often broadcast on completely different networks in different countries. A game on DAZN UK is not necessarily on every other global DAZN feed.

Tailored needs: Clients now require listings far into the future for forward scheduling, or hyper-specific coverage tailored only to one sport from one regional competition.

The rise of niche platforms: Even non-traditional players like YouTube and social media platforms are buying up niche or partial rights, adding moving parts to an already complicated system.

For an affiliate site to manually source and verify every data point across various regions and platforms would require a major, continuous investment in human capital and infrastructure. It’s a burden that few can realistically sustain to guarantee real-time accuracy while retaining operational efficiencies.

Accuracy as the foundation of trust

For any partner, going from a large betting operator to a content-focused platform like FANZO or OneFootball, accuracy is the absolute, non-negotiable foundation of their product integrity proposition. Users reasonably expect to know exactly where and how to watch a live event, and they expect that information to be correct every single time.

If a content site provides a single incorrect listing or misses a crucial stream, it directly damages its credibility and erodes user trust, which is the lifeblood of any competitive industry. Precision is paramount. This commitment to accuracy is why we have evolved the TSS solution from a basic broadcast listings tool into a comprehensive global data service.

Vigorous verification is essential. Every piece of data at TSS goes through a rigorous confirmation process, combining manual data collection from multiple official sources with expert oversight and extended validation checks. Real-time alerts within the TSS system allow our specialist team members, each with expertise in specific regions, to quickly identify and resolve broadcast changes – which might include postponements, channel swaps or late announcements of coverage – as they happen.

By accessing a client’s API, TSS can map events directly to their own event IDs, ensuring all data aligns perfectly with internal systems, thus dramatically reducing the need for time-consuming reconciliation.

Localisation is key

While sport is global, broadcasting is inherently local. An accurate data solution must be designed with this in mind. TSS localises its service for every region we cover, ensuring that listings, providers, and content are tailored to the local audience and rights holders.

This means accounting for regional broadcasters, in terms of knowing which channel has the specific rights in the UK, Italy, or Brazil, for example. It also means ensuring that start times are correct for the end-user’s geography, and adopting local naming conventions, ensuring instant recognition of a competition in that market.

It’s also crucial to offer a layer of flexibility. We work with clients to fulfil specific, ad-hoc channel requests based on their unique commercial deals with broadcasters. This ensures their end-users see the content advertised on the channels relevant to that specific partnership, all while remaining true to the underlying, verified broadcast reality. This localisation and flexibility layer makes TSS feel completely native in every market it serves, from Europe and South America to Australia and New Zealand.

Easing the burden

Without a dedicated product like TSS, clients would face major, resource-intensive challenges in sourcing, verifying, and standardising their own data. They would be forced to conduct weekly, or even daily, checks on fragmented global rights, a task that has become logistically nightmarish.

The TSS solution removes this enormous burden. By gathering verified data from trusted sources across thousands of broadcasts annually and delivering it in a consistent, easy-to-integrate format, it provides our clients with a single source of truth in an increasingly fragmented environment. In essence, Abelson Sports turns what would otherwise be a constant risk of data inaccuracy and user churn into a clear, reliable, and scalable competitive advantage.

By: Brad Gonsalves, Head of Televised & Streamed Sports (TSS) at Abelson Sports

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