By the second afternoon of IBC, the stands start to blur together, every one of them promising this is finally the year fan engagement gets solved. We get it, we walk the floor too.
So consider this our honest bid for thirty minutes of your day. We are in Hall 5 from 11 to 14 September, and this year we brought a launch with us: Arena, our sports-native app foundation, went live on 3 September with Stats Perform’s Opta products built in from the first release. Here are 5 reasons to swing by:
1. Meet Arena, powered by Opta
Arena went live on 3 September with Opta already inside it: fixtures, live scores, lineups, standings and player profiles mapped straight into the product, and Opta Pulse cutting short-form highlights into the vertical video modules on its own. That changes what launch day looks like. An Arena app opens with real match data and real clips in it, so the product feels like a season already in progress on the morning it ships. Underneath sits the work every sports app needs and nobody wants to build twice, from schedule logic and match statuses across time zones to content feeds, video, push and authentication. Your team picks it up where the product gets interesting, and a first release lands in weeks. Grab a seat in the Sports Bar and put your hands on it.
2. Hear Romy on digital maturity
On Sunday 13 September, 14:30 to 15:15, our Head of Global Business Development & Strategic Development, Romy Suárez, joins the Content Everywhere panel “A Tale of Two Feeds” alongside MASV and Tuxera. Her focus is digital maturity: how a sports organisation figures out where it really stands digitally, and sequences its next investments without letting a vendor’s roadmap set the order. If that is the call you are facing, this is the forty-five minutes to catch. You can carry it on with us afterwards.
3. See what the Innovation Lab is showing this year
The Innovation Lab is where we turn the way fans actually behave into prototypes you can touch. This year we took a streaming platform you would know in a heartbeat and rebuilt its front end around intentional navigation, so nothing sits where it does by accident: you always know where you are and what to do next, and a live match sits on the stream instead of three taps deep. Same feeds as everyone else, and the whole difference is in how it feels to use. You can only see this one in person, on the stand.
4. Get into the detail on Velvet
Velvet is our modular core for streaming platforms, and it carries sport and entertainment equally well. The platform stays yours: pick your own video player, analytics, CDN and DRM, swap any of them later, and run every screen from a single codebase across mobile, web and the living-room TV. The part worth seeing in person is the Presentation Manager, where your team rebuilds a home layout, moves a rail or switches a card type and publishes it live, with no developer in the loop. Step into the Cinema Lounge, grab a coffee, and we will walk the architecture with you.
5. Stick around for the Sports Bar
Yes, we built a genuine sports bar into the stand. There is usually a match on the screens, the drinks are cold, and on Friday 11 September at 4:30pm we hand day one over to a happy hour with Stats Perform at Stand 5.F51. Come for the drinks and the match, and the Arena and Opta story will come up on its own. Register ahead so we know to pour enough.
Find us in Hall 5, Stand 5.F51, from 11 to 14 September. Want a slot with the team locked in? Book a meeting and it is yours. Rather just wander over? Even better. The coffee is good, the demos are better, and the bar opens at four thirty.
