Implementing a collaborative approach of two major factors in virtualising a live physical esports event: broadcast production and mass consumption by sub-grouped socialised audiences

This project sets out to explore two major factors of virtualising a physical esports event. Firstly, we assess the ways in which production teams can collaborate and work remotely on a live production which includes live broadcast content, collaborative content creation and management of social communication. Esports already pushes the boundaries of live production in terms of efficiencies, challenging existing broadcast workflows and harnessing the very latest in technology. The current situation is certainly challenging this further. We will develop new workflows and systems to allow for an extremely efficient distributed creative workforce in view of adopting newly found efficiencies beyond a lockdown situation.

Secondly, we evaluate the behaviours, preferred forms of communication and collaborative activity between groups rather than just singular viewership online in order to replicate the way in which people would attend events and participate together in the physical realm. This specifically looks at the alternative value propositions, exclusive access and influence of live production through collaborative contribution. Gaming audiences already tend to group online particularly to play team based multiplayer games, however, very little has been done around smaller and multiple grouped/team based engagement of live entertainment. We would like to develop new techniques and build on platforms that allow people to group and collaborate online which we believe will initiate new thinking around how people socialise online around specific events.

Esports is in a unique position during the current global pandemic situation because we are able to continue operation of the competition online. However, we believe that our learnings throughout this period could be applied to other forms of live entertainment in the future. We have ongoing and immediate access to a large online audience to develop, implement and trial new and innovative techniques over the next few months and beyond.

This project also builds on an existing AotF project: Weavr.tv which has been designed to explore ways to engage and interact with audiences through means of cross reality, AI and ML data analysis and personalised narratives. Many of the current and near future developments of Weavr would potentially be also delivered through new techniques we outline in this project plan.