Pilots to profits: How the XR Sports Alliance will shape the future of immersive sportscasting

By Shaun Lim

For the past two years, the XR Sports Alliance (XRSA) has been exploring whether extended reality (XR) can become more than an immersive way to experience live sports. From its early experiments to real-world deployments, XRSA has been testing how immersive production, devices and distribution can come together to create new ways for fans to engage with sporting events.

Now, with its membership having grown to 33 organisations — ranging from sports rights owners to original equipment manufacturers, ecosystem infrastructure enablers, and sports and XR technology and other services providers — XRSA believes it has moved beyond the question of whether the ecosystem can work together. 

“Two years ago, the question was whether the ecosystem could coordinate an end-to-end process involving production, devices, distribution and rights owners,” said Lucy Trang Nguyen, Director of Strategic Alliances & Business Development, Emerging Technologies, Accedo.

Instead of relying on isolated pilots, the industry had to focus on launching sharing experiences to prove collaboration was possible, she told APB+.  Alongside Qualcomm Technologies and HBS, Accedo co-founded XRSA to turn isolated pilots into real-world deployments.

Today, the alliance uses a repeatable experimentation framework to share proof-of-concept learnings that demonstrate the model’s success.

The next, and perhaps more difficult, question is whether those experiments can translate into a commercially viable experience that sports fans will actually use and pay for.

“Whether it’s a distribution channel, a price point, or the right form factor for a casual fan to experience, you don’t skip from prototype to mass product without first knowing what actually drives immersion and what people will pay for,” said Nguyen.

Hardware maturity, she added, is also a key factor. As tethered virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) headsets potentially give way to everyday AI glasses, XRSA is designing experiments to scale immersive production, distribution and user experience across these evolving form factors. 

“Glasses becoming the new mainstream wearable is one of the most promising signals yet for immersive sports services to gain real adoption,” she said.

XR goes extreme 

Having conducted its first real-world deployment in 2025 with the E1 Series, an all-electric race boat championship, XRSA conducted its second real-world deployment earlier this year.

As the world’s largest urban sports festival, the Festival International des Sports Extrêmes (FISE) Montpellier 2026 provided the perfect testing ground. At the event, XRSA combined behavioural analytics with direct attendee feedback. Researchers tracked objective engagement metrics such as session duration, feature interaction, drop-off and repeat usage, alongside structured surveys and qualitative interviews, to evaluate practical technology adoption. 

“We’re also bringing in universities with spatial computing and sports programmes to add more rigorous methodology and deeper data analysis into future testing as we scale toward mainstream audiences,” said Nguyen.

When asked which metrics will define this mass-market appeal, she noted that successful commercial distribution will ultimately rely on a combination of distinct factors. Each XRSA experiment is designed to validate a specific set of objectives, which are in turn used to test the underlying assumptions. “It’s a series of metrics and experiments over time that will eventually shape the model that works,” she explained.

Specifically, there are three areas XRSA is tracking closely to measure long-term success. 

The first is hardware adoption, which focuses on user acceptance across different form factors. By evaluating how fans react to VR or MR headsets versus lightweight augmented reality (AR) and AI glasses, XRSA aims to determine which devices users prefer, and which ones offer the comfort and ease of use required for long-sessions viewing.

The second area centres on video format and production scalability. XRSA is analysing which immersive formats — such as 180-degree, 360-degree, or volumetric video — drive the highest engagement and value for sports fans. Crucially, they are investigating how these complex formats can be produced and distributed across multiple devices in the most cost- and time-efficient manner.

Finally, XRSA is examining viable commercial models to ensure monetisation feels organic. They are tracking whether user interactions with sponsored immersive content feel natural and value-driven rather than intrusive. “Answering that tells us what value immersive can actually deliver to sponsors, and how to integrate them meaningfully into the experience,” said Nguyen.

Having started with just three founding members, XRSA has already seen its membership grow by more than 10-fold. As XRSA looks to reach a truly mainstream global audience, the addition of Manchester United sends a strong signal regarding its scale and ambition.

While the English football club currently sits within XRSA as an Observing Member through its existing partnership with Qualcomm, the role provides the club with direct visibility into the ecosystem’s experimentation and learnings. This positioning is designed with a view towards a potential active deployment in the future.

Other notable new members include HOVERAir and Antigravity, the latter of which introduces a world-first 8K 360° drone. This technology gives production teams a powerful new storytelling tool, establishing shots, dynamic reveals and transitions between wide context and close action, all within a single immersive take.

Overall, aerial capture adds a dimension that ground-based or athlete-mounted rigs simply cannot replicate. “It provides sweeping context, scale, and geography that helps a viewer who doesn’t know the sport orient themselves fast, which matters enormously for casual engagement,” said Nguyen.

At FISE Montpellier, aerial capture was put to the test through the combined production of 180-degree, 360-degree and drone footage. While the formats were evaluated individually, they were ultimately edited into a single, cohesive immersive piece. “As with every capability we add, the real proof is what we learn, putting it in front of real audiences, not what’s on the spec sheet,” she added.

Unlocking revenue, the path to APAC expansion

The recent FISE experiment was explicitly designed to assess sponsorship integration, evaluating how natural branded elements feel, whether they add value and where they create measurable commercial interest beyond basic brand awareness. 

Signalling how XSRA is edging towards answering how immersive sports will be monetised, Nguyen noted, “We’ve moved from an open question to a structured hypothesis we’re actively testing with real fans and sponsor integrations, with results feeding directly into internal reports for the full membership.”

Furthering this commercial push, XSR has welcomed CAA Sports, the global sports representation arm of Creative Artists Agency, into its latest cohort.

CAA Sports brings deep expertise in commercial structures, helping XRSA translate fan engagement data into viable sponsorship and revenue frameworks that work for both rights owners and brands.

Beyond monetising the experience, XRSA is also laying the groundwork for geographic growth, particularly within promising Asia-Pacific (APAC) markets like Japan, South Korea, China, and India.

Bringing the first XR sports deployment to the region requires two critical pieces, revealed Nguyen.

First, it demands a regional rights owner or sports event partner ready to co-design an experiment through a committed, hands-on partnership. Second, it requires members on the ground to execute and test the technology on-site.

XRSA has already secured that operational foundation through its latest cohort additions, which include ByteDance-owned VR headset company PICO and aerial robotics brand HOVERAir, both headquartered in China. 

“That gives us a real device and captures expertise rooted in the region. What’s missing is the rights owner partner ready to co-design the first deployment with us,” concluded Nguyen.