The social media attention span is seeing millennials drift away from live sports viewing but coverage innovation and data will bring them back, that’s the message of Hype Sports Innovation which through its SPIN programme in mentoring and backing hundreds of start-ups.

Speaking at the launch of a new partnership with Maccabi Haifa FC, Dr Ilan Hadar, chief innovation officer of Hype Sports, said the evidence was clear that those sports that had shortened their form and engaged with technology – such as basketball – had prospered, while others had not; baseball used be the #1 TV sport in America, it was now #4. Some late starters, like tennis and golf, were now embracing the need to leverage technology for greater fan engagement.

Hadar also pointed out that stars had superseded the team; in a classic example Ronaldo has 819 million social media followers while Real Madrid has 189 million – and that’s how Juventus can justify €100 million for a player coming to the end of his playing career.

Hype introduced a number of start-ups it is nurturing, all of which aim to enhance match day coverage or use data to promote fan engagement. Fan League lets fans compete by gaining fan points – game attendance, games watched on TV – to move up and down a league. Fan Pass Tick is a platform for clubs that uses a range of data to predict whether a ticket holder is going to attend and pre-emptively offers them the chance to trade in their ticket if they are going to miss the game and share in the revenue.

InSoundz changes the way sound is experienced in live event broadcasting by employing patented sound technology that is able to capture, index, analyse and deliver all audio content, with relevancy and clarity, from live events to any screen type, so goalkeeper or coach instructions can be heard, as can interactions with the referee – there is a momentary delay function, for obvious reasons.

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