Star Sports, Disney + Hotstar
Metaverse
With a sports fan base of 136.3 million, it was highly reasonable for Star Sports to step into the Metaverse. When they partnered with Hotstar and Ink In Caps to create starverse, their idea was to curate the experience keeping the Indian Audience as the kingpin.
2x awards won in different categories
We leveraged the power of WebGL, Web3, and Real-time Communication tech to replicate the Star Sports studios and Livestream the Finals of the Men’s Cricket T20 World Cup in Metaverse. A virtual environment was made for multiple Star Sports Studios, PCR Room & the Wankhede Stadium during IPL. This was followed by live-streaming the first-ever Cricket match in Metaverse.
Profound Research & Development was involved as we were looking at replicating the entire real-world scenario into a humanized virtual setup. Life-like avatars of Sports Experts- Ravi Shastri, Mayanti Langer, and Irfan Pathan were created and Live chat shows were hosted by these avatars within Metaverse. The avatars came to life with a predetermined set of triggers and animations which were controlled from backend consoles and closely resembled their actions and expressions from real-life.
The touchpoints on the platform were made utterly relatable to the Indian mass. Indians love to watch the match with their friends/family, so a Private Lounge was created in Metaverse where users could invite and watch the match with their friends or watch it with other fans in the Fan Park while having live calls and chats. The user journey was scrupulously crafted to provide an explicit real-life experience keeping in mind the inquisitive nature of the fans. They had umpteen things to discover and experience like interaction with Cricket experts in the Studio rooms, Live chat shows between Cricket experts, Photo booths, Cricket quizzes, a chance to create a Dream team, and display autographs along with other captivating features. To bring the fans closer to the Cricket experts and Leading Cricketers, a Q&A session was organized between them. Holographic portal doors were set up to teleport the users directly to the zones of their choice.
To increase accessibility for the 85% of users who access Metaverse through a phone, a mobile-first approach, supporting both Android and iOS, was adopted for developing Starverse. Two dedicated teams were made to work hand-in-hand while incorporating all the new feature s and updates in the platform for introducing it for both Android and iOS, syncing the pipelines, and eliminating any hindrances forthwith.
Supporting sub-mid range & mid-range phones along with the bandwidth limitation occurring for a wider range was a big battle to fight. We carefully crafted an environment to minimize the initial load and allocate the other heavy elements as asset bundles on the platform later. This was done with the intent to optimize our server to the extent that the first load is done at the earliest without the user dropping off. Hotstar was integrated into the Starverse platform to tackle the scalability challenge.
The live-streaming of the Cricket Match was the commencement of the next Tech Revolution. The response was exhilarating with seamless user experience and massive logins to enjoy the live stream. Cricket fans logged on to the platform with great enthusiasm to feel the thrill of watching the finals in Metaverse along with their friends and other fans. Fans were seen exploring the Private Lounge, Fan Park, and Rivalry Zone to stir up the delight of getting easy access to the Metaverse. The platform experienced 1000s of interactions and that portrays the massive scale of this innovation.
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