Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is ready for the Paris Olympics and the opportunities that the Summer Games will bring for the media and entertainment giant’s streamer Max and beyond, Andrew Georgiou, president and managing director of WBD U.K. & Ireland and WBD Sports Europe, signaled in a chat with journalists on Thursday. And he discussed how AI and digital navigation innovations on streaming services will add to consumers’ ability to discover and enjoy the big event.
This year’s Games are the first since the merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia into WBD. The company will show the Summer Olympics 2024 across 47 markets in 19 languages on its streaming platforms Max and Discovery+, depending on the specific market, with TV coverage on its Eurosport channels.
“Most importantly, from our perspective, the Olympics is going to be a really important ingredient in the launch plans for Max, which we’ve already launched in 25 markets in Europe,” the executive told reporters from Paris during a virtual roundtable. “The Olympics, having just come off the heels of season 2 of House of the Dragon is a really important additional marker in building the Max brand across Europe and everything that we do.”
He concluded: “It’s a really important evolution of our launch strategy for Max, and there is a huge focus on that for us as part of these Games.”
Georgiou also noted the opportunity to cross-promote other WBD brands during the Games. For example, Max in France is currently promoting the likes of Barbie, Wonka, and Ocean’s Eleven on its service, he mentioned. The exec predicted this would help “increase acquisition, increase engagement” and boost retention of streaming subscribers.
Plus, WBD’s CNN is set up in the same space in Paris as the WBD Sports team, also allowing broader access to athletes and more collaboration across company units, he said.
He was also asked about the previously announced use of WBD’s Looney Tunes characters to help get people into the Olympic Spirit. The company has rolled out Looney Tunes content shorts for kids and families that explain such sports as tennis, gymnastics and breakdancing, which is a new Olympic discipline.
Georgiou said that this “quite frankly is a bit of fun as we try to engage younger audiences and do something a bit different.” He added: “Looney Tunes and Bugs Bunny interviewing some athletes and things like that’s just a bit of fun that we hope just creates a bit of color around what we do as a company and how we can engage different audiences on different platforms. We are in a very much different business. We’ve got a lot more assets and a lot more scale, and the quality and breadth of our content continue to be fantastic. It is a different world for us for sure to be WBD at the Olympics.”
The streaming platforms allow for digital innovations that should help audiences find and enjoy more of the sports content they love and crave, Georgiou also argued on Thursday.
“Max and the digital platforms give you a different opportunity to create tools and engagement that give more control to the consumer around how they experience the content they love,” he said, calling the Olympics “one of the hardest” sporting events to navigate “because there are so many things happening all at the same time.” For example, “the highest concurrency of simultaneous events happening during these Games is 54 simultaneous live events that we broadcast in those 50 markets in 20 different languages,” the exec explained. “With the volume of content, 3,800 hours of live competition that we will broadcast on our streaming platform, you’ve got to provide tools for the audience to navigate. Some of them are new, and some of them are better than they were.”
Some fans will want to watch their country’s athletes or teams. “If I’m a British fan, and I want to watch Team GB, then what we’ve created is a fully curated area … where you come in, and we have a team page. Or come and watch the best of Team France, all the live French athletes performing at that moment. You’ll get in a single destination – all the highlights for the French athletes will be in that area.”
The other offering is for fans looking to watch their favorite sports. “So we’ve got sports-specific navigation that allows the customer and the fan to get to all the particular sports, and then we’ve got an electronic programming guide, or effectively a schedule, that allows people to see what’s live right now,” Georgiou said.
Once viewers get into WBD’s Olympics coverage on digital platforms, WBD has more features up its sleeve. For example, timeline markers that have been used by Discovery+ in the U.K. have been “extended” to 11 different sports, Georgious highlighted. “Some of these session times are really long for sports, whether it’s swimming or athletics. If you join halfway through the day, you can use the timeline markers and go back and forward to all the key points to get you the bits that are interesting that we’ve editorially curated for you.”
What about the use of AI? “Some of that is done through data and artificial intelligence, they can place those timeline markers on the timeline markers,” the exec explained.
A second feature is the use of medal alerts. “As you’re watching something, if there is a gold medal event that happens in another sport that you’re not watching, what will happen on screen is … an alert will come up, and it’ll say, ‘just so you know, gold medal event in judo happening now – click here.’ And if you want to go and watch the gold medal event, with one click, you can go to that event,” Georgiou explained.
A third key feature is a live event rail. “So at any point in time, you can bring up all the other simultaneous events that are happening, rather than having to go back out,” the WBD executive touted. “It’s a rail that you can pull up yourself as a user, and then if you want to navigate away, you know what else is happening live.”
A final feature offered to help drive engagement is a multi-audio feed, meaning that regardless of what market viewers are in, they can choose to watch in different languages. For example, “if you’re Polish, but living in France, you can still log on to Max, but you can pull up Polish language on the volleyball and watch that event but listen to it in your local language if that’s what you want to do,” he explained.
Concluded Georgiou: “There’s a whole bunch of stuff that we’ve done around the product where we say the best way to watch the Olympics actually is on our digital service. Because whilst the linear distribution is great because it curates a day-long story, it doesn’t allow you to choose what’s interesting to you.”