Media Mavens: The Innovid Interview with Chris Karl

Editor’s Note: This Q&A is the latest installment in an occasional blog series where Innovid interviews industry thought leaders about their take on the future of advertising and media.

Chris Karl is the Chief Business Development Officer at JEGI Clarity, an M&A advisory firm for the media, marketing, information, and technology industries. In his career he has been a leader at a number of digital and electronic media businesses, including Sonobi, MediaMath, Kontera, Yahoo!, and earlier in his career PointCast, and MTV Networks. He sat down with Innovid and shared his insights on the shift of live sports moving from linear TV to streaming and its implications for advertisers. 

Innovid: How fast is the shift occurring of live sports moving from linear TV to streaming?

Chris Karl: It’s interesting timing with Disney acquiring the majority of FuboTV, a sports platform, to kick off 2025. That bundle brings more sports into the mix for Disney+. Smart move by Disney. The growth in the value of the rights to live-streamed sports over the last 10 years has been pretty dramatic. It’s around a $27 billion to $30 billion market, and it’s growing at about $3 billion a year. It's just amazing. Live sports are a proven opportunity for aggregating eyeballs as the network audiences have shrunk due to the migration of people to streaming environments. It becomes clear that the way that streaming players, like Amazon, Netflix and others, continue to build their businesses and get you onto those platforms is through live sports. If you like sports, you've probably signed up for one of those platforms to see a game. I think connected TV and streaming are all about content discovery for niche audiences versus broadcast TV, which is all about aggregating the largest audiences and programming only to them. If you think about niche sports, like tennis or cricket, you could watch these sports throughout the year. Almost every day, there’s a tournament that is being aired somewhere, and streaming is a natural platform for making those available. 

What are the long-term implications?

Karl: It's quite a long tail. What I envision happening over time is that the OEMs like Samsung, LG, and Vizio, as they get into curating more of their own content, they're going to think about sports as a necessary place to invest. They've already built sports content channels that are more archival stuff like classic games, but you could see them wanting to get in on the actual live sports. 

What live sports are you watching on streaming? 

Karl: There are certain MLB games that are on Amazon. There are also football games — Thursday Night Football — on Amazon. Netflix is also getting into the NFL. I subscribe to two or three different random high school sports streaming channels that allow me to watch a game, whether it be lacrosse or football or hockey. If you have friends or children who play on those teams, instead of driving three hours to go to a game, you can just put it on TV and watch it. It’s pretty cool. 

How are streamers making their telecasts more interactive? 

Karl: NBC did a great job with the Olympics this summer in terms of allowing the consumer to find their own programming across all the different events. So you can see how technically it can be done. Interactivity is going to be big. Betting obviously has potential. All of that stuff is coming. I've seen lots of interesting examples and technologies that create shopping opportunities on top of a movie, betting opportunities on top of games, community watch parties. All of that technology is being built. Next-generation TVs are going to be more friendly to real-time downloads. Connected TV has been purposely built to be like linear TV. It’s a channel-surfing kind of user experience. It hasn’t yet had that form factor change that was the difference between a web page and an app. The difference between a web page and an app was pretty different. We just haven't seen that for CTV yet. We haven't figured out what that form factor is yet.

Do you have a sense of what that form factor change you describe might look like for CTV? 

Karl: I think we'll see experimentations for the next five years, and then maybe some standards will come into play. There are already these pop-up, rich media type formats that can come up on the bottom portion of the screen. The QR code has been used quite a bit to get the mobile phone to be your second screen for interaction. I think the remote controls are going to have to get some better navigation — maybe they're voice-activated as a better way of getting yourself through an interactive experience on the TV screen. I think Walmart's acquisition of Vizio is really interesting. I think commerce integration is something to watch, and retail media opportunities will be significant. The TV is becoming the command center of the house. We have a house computer at home that hasn’t been touched in like, three years. It just sits on a desk. Everybody has their own phone, their own laptop. I think that the center of the household is shifting towards the TV. You will be able to interact with it on Netflix with your own personal finger button, and you’ll be able to check your bank balance or send an email or check your socials right through the connected TV.

Learn more about the power of live-streamed sports for advertisers. Download Winning Big with CTV Advertising on Live-Streamed Sports today. 

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