Sport upstart LIGR may be the future of live broadcasting

A small Australian company aims to provide a cheap alternative for sports leagues to stream matches directly to fans online.

A small Australian company that aims to provide a cheap alternative for sports to stream matches directly to fans online, or broadcasters looking to cut production costs, has raised a seven-figure sum from local and international investors.

Founded three years ago, LIGR is a platform for managing and producing professional graphics and in-game advertising displays and reporting for live sports broadcasts. Its software helps integrate advertising into broadcasts, as well as information such as scores or start lists and other statistics, all of which is loaded and automated during a live sports event such as a football match or athletics.

Co-founder Luke McCoy said his firm should be well placed in a sports industry post-COVID-19 in which broadcasters will be looking for cheaper rights deals and sports themselves could produce more of their own content to on-sell to networks or stream directly to consumers.

“Rights fees are too expensive if the audience wanes, like with the A-League, and the ad revenue dries up,” Mr McCoy said. “It’s the combination of rights fees and production costs that hurt the broadcasters, and if ad revenue dries up but production costs stay the same, then they need to cut rights fees or cut production costs. At the moment, they are trying to do both.”

Mr McCoy said sports leagues were calculating whether they could pay for production themselves and own their own content, potentially building subscriptions and use an off-the-shelf streaming system. But the risk is greater if they try to use traditional production methods that can cost anywhere from $40,000 to $120,000 a month.

“We can help leagues bring those costs down, maintain quality, maintain commercial integrations but allow economies of scale,” he said.

LIGR has raised $1m from UK firm Alston Elliot, which has produced broadcast graphics for rugby and cricket world cups, soccer leagues, Sydney angel investor group Investible and wealthy private investors Danny Bhandari and Kinsey Cotton.

Mr McCoy said the funds would be used to develop the company’s technology, which LIGR says has been used for more than 10,000 sports games in three years, with more than 1000 advertisements or information uploaded to the platform.

LIGR started by producing state soccer, league and Australian football games, and has since worked for Cricket Australia and other national bodies.