Morning all! After a day of running around London yesterday I’m back in charge of the Daily Digital Digest (thanks Chris for stepping in). Tomorrow I’ll be hanging around at Campaign’s Future Fit event thanks to our friends at We Are Social Sport. Say hi if you see me! 

Amazon will be a ‘major disruptive force’ to live sports rights in the next few years, analyst says (cnbc.com)

With the recent MLB / Facebook deal and Amazon still in the mix for new sports deals when they come up (still no news on the last 2 Premier League packages). We can certainly expect many more major deals coming through in the next 12-18 months as they test out how their platforms will work best with live events. The feeling is that they are gearing up for 2021 when the major US sports broadcast deals come up for renewal.

DFL Digital Sports: Putting the ‘Pun-desliga’ on the map (sportspromedia.com)

I’m a big fan of what the Bundesliga is doing on social media, and with their testing of technology in general. They have been helped along the way by Seven League, who have just announced their involvement and an extension into next season as well. And next month SportsPro Live will be hosting DFL Digital Sport’s Andreas Heyden, someone who I had the pleasure of having on the DS Insider podcast not so long ago. In this interview with SportsPro he gives some great insights into how they do what they do so well.

Turner, CBS to Live-Stream 21 March Madness Games in VR for $2.99 Each (variety.com)

The slow march towards a VR offering for sports that we will all jump on continues. You can now watch 21 matches in this year’s March Madness, choosing your own camera angles and other bespoke offerings just inside the app. We know the obstacles that VR has to overcome but broadcasters see what the future can hold and are allowing us to experiment with them along the way.

Facebook aiming to launch News for Watch this summer (axios.com)

As Facebook looks at other opportunities as well as sports to provide content for the new Watch section and looks for solutions in the spread of “fake news”. This could be one way of doing that by becoming a news destination. It could not only give another reason to spend more time within their walled garden but also to find out what is going on in the world from trusted sources. It’s only a rumour as to what is going on but could be a true one.

Today’s youth will save brands – and humanity – from the bias of AI (thedrum.com)

Is AI the future, or is it already the here and now? Both really. We are used to AI helping our selections whether that’s on Amazon whilst shopping or getting your news updates from Facebook. It’s also come in for a lot of bad press and scare stories as we move to automate more and more tasks. But there is hope that AI bias (the machines are only as good as the data that is inputted by us humans) is being fought against by the youth in our society who have grown up as ‘digital natives’.

ESPORTS SPECIAL – 27TH MARCH @ GFINITY ARENA, LONDON