Some thoughts ahead of #HostCity2022 next week.
"COVID has brought about a step change in audience expectations, which must be seen in the context of a longer history of making our live and remote experiences increasingly immersive, flexible, and technologically enabled. The Web2 era nurtured this desire and COVID embedded the expectation, readying us for web3.
For sure, the error we make is concluding that this is a move away from the importance of physical space as a crucial component of a compelling experience, but what's changing is the capacity to level up the physical world with immersive integrations which have been prototyped during COVID. Audiences expect to be more active and the data driven event economy finds a crucial extension through volumetric and locative audience data.
The future of the elite event experience is phygital - e.g watching digital content layered over a physical swimming pool and seeing the projection of Olympic swimmers live into the space, as it happens, or the transition of triathlons into arena based virtual worlds, or running in your gym alongside athletes as they compete. These are our clues which shed light onto the future and it's as big a shift as was the design of the amphitheatre in ancient Greece.
In this context, rights holders need to massively rethink what they do and what they are in relation to their audience. Simply staging something isn't enough anymore. The Olympic Channel is a great example of how institutions are experimenting to find their feet in a world where the media proposition around events is vastly different. The MVP in this future is to wrangle the innovation community that can remake events for a vastly different set of audience expectations."
Join us for Host City in Glasgow next week!
