A new perspective for TV viewers: Tactical Feed provides contextual information

30 August 2021 – To provide viewers with an experience that anticipates their individual preferences and delivers relevant match information to them at just the right time, domestic TV broadcaster Sky now offers the DFL’s innovative Tactical Feed as an added-value service during Saturday night Bundesliga top matches.

While the main camera always shows the full-pitch view, including all 20 outfield players, the Tactical Feed supplies momentary, situation-driven information and graphics in an inverted L-shaped space at the right-hand edge of the screen. In particular, it integrates the popular Bundesliga Match Facts powered by AWS, giving it a more prominent place on screen. For example, viewers can see the players’ average positions, team-related tactical data, or a player’s running stats and position. All this helps viewers assess the events on the pitch and keep an eye on the big picture. The Tactical Feed is a result of close cooperation between the DFL and its media partner Sky. It marks the first time within the German-speaking core market that DFL delivers a complete and broadcast-ready ‘Managed Service’, a fully processed media product, to customers.

As for Sky, being able to offer the Tactical Feed as a ‘second screen’ to its viewers represents a significant upgrade for customers. To date, more than 200,000 subscribers have used the Tactical Feed during peak times. “Our close collaboration with the DFL on the Tactical Feed has allowed us to enhance integration of the Bundesliga Match Facts and provide a better service to our customers by showing focused, highly relevant match information in a dedicated on-screen feed that can be added dynamically in response to the match,” says Alessandro Reitano, Senior Vice President Sports Production at Sky.

“The Tactical Feed is an example of both partners’ commitment to adapting their services dynamically to suit changing viewer behaviour,” says Steffen Merkel, Director Audio-visual Rights and Member of the Management Board at DFL GmbH: “We want these overlays to enhance the viewing experience by providing helpful information in an unintrusive way. The content is determined by Sky and DFL in a joint editorial process. And this is only the beginning – clearly it is our goal to continue improving the Tactical Feed by adding innovative features, such as live data.”

The entire DFL Group has been involved in the development of this service, including the DFL subsidiaries and affiliates DFL Digital Sports GmbH, Sportcast GmbH and Sportec Solutions AG.

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