If there’s one thing people love to do, it’s chat. Whether it’s about themselves, their passions, or their opinions, it’s a part of human nature to want to socialize to connect with others, enjoy communal moments, and create and manage our personal reputations.
Conversing with others is a considerable part of our everyday lives, and since being able to do it online, it has only accelerated: Messenger has almost 1 billion monthly active users (source), more than 100B messages were sent each day on WhatsApp in 2020 (source), and the most popular category on Twitch is “Just Chatting” (source). The more people are connected to others and can chat—even virtually—the more they feel they are part of a greater community.
With all this in mind, we have always made sure to prioritize powering three different types of live chats that allow users to connect effectively in real time. In this product feature, we’re focusing on the most commonly used of our three chat types: Public Live Chat.
Introducing Public Live Chat
In order to empower positive social experiences among your platform users, we have developed a feature that enables engaging, easy-to-use and easy-to-monitor real-time public discussion.
With our public chat feature, your users get to engage in live conversation with other fans of your platform who likely share the same interests, passions, goals, or opinions, all without needing to know each other beforehand. Our public chat feature has the ability to bring together thousands of people simultaneously to interact on your platform, and discuss your live events or product offering in real time. It is an amazing tool to engage people, empower a community and incentivize users to return to your platform more frequently.
Main Features:
Our Audience Engagement Suite provides you with Chat UI and APIs to create a fully customized public chat experience that is tailored to your brand and your users. The supported features of the chat system include In-App Notifications, Room Member Lists, Avatars, Stickers, Reactions, Spoiler Prevention, the ability to report offensive messages, and of course, Moderation Tools.
When creating a chat room, you will get access to all the basic information you need in order for it to run smoothly: Room ID, Room Title, and Visibility (whether or not you want your chat to appear for members only or for all site visitors). The chat UI elements, including input windows, chat body, and chat bubbles, can be customized per your design guidelines.
Public Chat & Reactions:
The only thing that comes more naturally to us than talking to one another is reacting to the things other people say; and so of course, we had to make sure reacting to messages was an option in the digital world as well.
Whether your users disagree or are perfectly aligned with what someone else has said in a public live chat, our chat capabilities allow them to express their feelings and react with relevant emojis. The reactions you allow your fans to choose from are grouped into “Reaction Packs” and can be uploaded to your producer suite. Each reaction pack can contain up to four reactions.
Reaction packs can be customized based on your brand guidelines or on those of your partners if you wish to activate your partnership through our Chat feature.
Public Chat & Stickers
Have you heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words? Sometimes, an image is the only way to truly and accurately express a person’s feelings, evoke an emotion, or get a message across. Using our chat feature, your audience will be able to interact with chats not only by sending text messages but also by sending visual stickers (images, GIFs, etc.). This simple yet powerful feature works to drive engagement and draws in users to make them even more inclined and excited to chat with other fans. This holds especially true when the stickers fans have the option of using are relevant to the platform, typical user discussion topics, or the feelings they are likely looking to express during a live event. For example, users of a sports platform chat are likely to want a sticker pack that features GIFs of their favorite teams celebrating a goal, major athletes playing on the field, or even famous moments in sports that evoke an emotion. Giving fans a selection of stickers that are funny, relevant to their niche or to your industry, or entertaining in any way, will make them more inclined to use them and in turn drive higher engagement in your chat and on your platform.
Moderation Tools
Moderation is a mandatory feature when integrating a public chat, as it allows you to control what people are saying, and avoid the use of inappropriate language, insults, and other bad behavior that might deter people from using your platform.
As a part of the LiveLike Public Chat toolkit, we have developed key solutions to help you create the safest public chat experience for your fans. Firstly, we have enabled Automatic Filtering, a feature that allows you to ensure chat messages are being automatically moderated and filtered based on their contents. Automatic filters can be set up to work in a keyword-driven way (if a message contains a word from a customized list of bad words, it will be filtered) or in an AI-driven way (if an AI model recognizes a message as being objectionable, it will be filtered).
Adding to our moderation tools, if you don’t trust machines and want to moderate your public live chats yourself, you have the ability to do so as Moderator, and can delete messages, make user reports other users to moderators, block users, or mute them.
Leveraging Public Chat to Drive Business Objectives
Not only does the Public Chat widget have the ability to draw in new users and engage your existing audience, it can also help you to meet some of your key business objectives and monetization goals.
By pairing it with the rest of our Audience Engagement Suite—including our widgets, leaderboards, and loyalty rewards programs— you’ll be able to create a complete user journey and incentivize users to spend more time on your platform and sign up for your product or service. Of course, logged-out users will get a modified UI provided by the integrators that prompt them to log in or sign up to participate.
Case Study
Many brands across the industries have successfully activated our Public Chat feature to empower their community:
GIGSET, a music platform for artists to perform online for their fans, used our chat feature to let audience members share their love for the event with other fans during concerts.
LaLiga used it to bring more interactivity to the watch parties they organized for their fans over the 2021 football season.
FloSports uses our public live chat on top of their programs in their mobile applications to better engage users. 19% of unique users on the FloSports app typed at least one message and they registered a significant increase in time spent on their application.
All in all, it’s important to give your users every opportunity to voice their opinion, provide feedback on your platform experience, and engage with other members of the community.
When used effectively and paired with relevant stickers, protective moderation tools, and useful reaction packs, Public Live Chat allows you to empower social experiences, foster a sense of community, and engage users on your platform.
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The LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite is a finalist in the region's leading broadcast technology awards, recognising the fan engagement platform's work with sports broadcasters and rights holders
New York, July 31 - LiveLike, the fan engagement platform used by sports broadcasters, streaming services and rights holders worldwide, has been shortlisted for Best in Sports at the BroadcastPro ME Manufacturer Awards 2026 for the LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite.
The awards recognise product innovation, engineering excellence and technology development across the broadcast ecosystem. Finalists were selected across 21 broadcast and satellite categories following industry-wide voting and review by an independent panel of experts. Winners will be announced on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at The Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina in Dubai, UAE.
The Audience Engagement Suite gives broadcasters and rights holders a way to build interactive experiences directly into their streams and owned platforms - predictions, quizzes, live chat, rewards, loyalty programmes and community hubs - without assembling separate point solutions for each one. Every interaction feeds a single evolving profile of the fan, which the platform then uses to personalise what that fan is offered next.
That combination is the argument LiveLike has been making across the industry this year. Fan engagement has been mischaracterised as a set of features layered onto a broadcast, when the durable value sits underneath: the behavioural graph that every interaction contributes to, and the AI layer operating on top of it. LiveLike's AI layer, Genie, now runs a growing share of the programmes the company operates on behalf of clients, moving the work from manual content management toward automated orchestration.
The Middle East and North Africa is one of the most active regions in the world for this shift. Major tournament rights, rapid growth in sports streaming and rising expectations around second-screen and in-stream interaction have made direct-to-fan engagement a commercial priority for broadcasters across the region rather than an experiment.
"Fan engagement gets treated as a set of features bolted onto a broadcast, and we've never seen it that way," said Miheer Walavalkar, co-founder and CEO of LiveLike. "What we build sits underneath the experience. There are the surfaces fans actually touch, and then there is the profile of that fan which gets sharper every time they touch one. The second part is the part that compounds, and it's the reason a broadcaster can keep getting more out of the platform in year three than they did in year one."
"Being shortlisted in a category assessed by the people who operate live sport in this region carries weight," he added. "They know the difference between something that demos well and something that holds up on a match night."
Sports organisations have spent decades refining three core revenue streams: direct fan spend, media rights, and sponsorship. The playbook is well understood. What is less understood, and far less developed, is the data infrastructure that connects those streams to each other and to the fans who power all of them.
Most organisations know they are sitting on significant amounts of fan data. Ticketing systems, CRM platforms, social channels, digital content interactions: the signals are there. But in the vast majority of cases, that data sits in disconnected silos, producing consulting reports rather than actionable intelligence. The result is a fragmented picture of the fan - one that limits commercial potential across every revenue line.
On a recent episode of Future of Fandom, LiveLike CEO and co-founder Miheer Walavalkar sat down with Aidan Cooney, CEO of Envision Sport Group and co-founder of Opta, to unpack this problem in detail. Cooney has spent 25 years building data and fan intelligence businesses across football, cricket, tennis, and rugby. His perspective on unified fan data, the shift from B2B to B2C thinking, and the convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing offers a practical framework for any organisation trying to move beyond fragmented data toward genuine sports intelligence.
From performance data to fan data: the Opta origin story
Cooney's career started with a simple hypothesis. In the late 1990s, football's status as the world's biggest sport came with surprisingly thin storytelling. Broadcasts offered a scoreline, occasional possession graphics, and goalscorer information. American sports, by contrast, had long used statistics to bring audiences closer to the action.
"If you give fans a higher-resolution understanding of what's happening on the pitch, you bring them closer to the sport they love," Cooney explained. That principle drove the creation of Opta, which transformed how football was analysed, discussed, and consumed. The OptaJoe account became a case study in sports data storytelling, building a following of hundreds of thousands across media, journalism, and the broader sports industry.
But Opta was fundamentally about what happened on the pitch. The return path - how fans reacted to that information and what their behaviour revealed - became the foundation for everything Cooney built next: Ellipse Data, InCrowd, and ultimately Cortex.
The difference between a customer data platform and a fan data platform
One of the most important distinctions Cooney drew in the conversation is the gap between conventional customer data platforms and what a fan data platform actually needs to do. Standard CDPs are designed for rational, price-sensitive purchasers. A fan is something else entirely.
"A fan wants to belong. They're passionate about the player or the team they support. The data that matters to you is very different from a purely rational, transactional data proposition," Cooney said.
The implication is that transactional data - which most sports organisations have invested in through ticketing CRM - is necessary but insufficient. Behavioural data is where the real value sits: how a fan reacts to a particular piece of content, when they react, whether content about a specific player activates more engagement than content about the team as a whole. This is the layer that informs personalisation, shapes content strategy, and ultimately creates trackable, monetizable assets for brand partnerships.
Cooney's platform, Cortex, is designed specifically for this purpose: unifying transactional and behavioural data into a single fan data platform that can activate across channels. LiveLike's engagement and gamification tools then sit on top of that foundation, turning data into community and interaction into measurable value.
The silo problem and why unification comes first
When asked about the most common mistakes sports organisations make with their data, Cooney's answer was immediate: silos.
"Very few organisations have a true single view of their fan base. That is the starting point for everything." Some silos are functional, built by design for specific use cases like ticket sales. Others are structural, created by the relationship between leagues and clubs or by the patchwork of technology vendors an organisation has accumulated over time.
The cost of these silos is not abstract. Without a unified single view, organisations cannot connect their content strategy to their commercial strategy. They cannot attribute sponsorship value to specific fan interactions. They cannot retarget fans who engaged with a poll, a vote, or a piece of branded content. Every disconnected system represents lost compounding value.
Cooney's prescription is direct: "You can't activate until you unify." And the use cases for doing so - from personalised content delivery to integrated brand campaigns - are available now in ways they were not five or even three years ago.
Sponsorship, media, and the hybrid model
One of the most commercially significant ideas in the conversation was Cooney's framing of the convergence between sponsorship and performance marketing. Sponsorship, in its traditional form, has not fundamentally changed since Mark McCormack and Arnold Palmer in the 1960s. It remains an awareness play, hard to attribute, and increasingly constrained as a share of total brand marketing spend.
Performance marketing budgets, by contrast, are growing rapidly. Social media ads, YouTube pre-rolls, programmatic buying: brands are spending heavily on audience acquisition through channels that offer clear attribution. The problem for sports properties is that these two budget pools rarely connect.
"If you create a more diverse set of assets and present them as an integrated media plan, you open up new budget areas within brands," Cooney argued. The opportunity for rights holders is to bridge that gap by combining the premium, trust-based qualities of sponsorship with the attribution model of performance marketing.
In practice, this looks like branded content paired with interactive fan experiences - polls, votes, and predictions that generate first-party data - which can then be used for retargeting and attribution. LiveLike's interactive tools are designed to create exactly these kinds of measurable, brand-integrated fan touchpoints that produce both engagement data and commercial inventory.
AI, personalisation, and the crawl-walk-run path
Both Cooney and Walavalkar addressed the promise and the practical limits of AI-driven fan personalisation. The long-term vision is clear: AI that can serve individual fans with content, offers, and experiences tailored to their specific behaviours and preferences. The economics and infrastructure to do this at true 1-to-1 scale, Walavalkar noted, are still being worked out across every industry.
The pragmatic starting point is cohort-based personalisation. Group fans by location, by behavioural patterns captured in your fan data platform, by engagement tendencies during comebacks or winning streaks. Let cohorts emerge dynamically from the data rather than relying on predefined segments.
"By putting the fan at the centre and serving them at the cohort level, you improve the fan experience, which drives up engagement levels, which drives up the value of the inventory you create on the back of it," Cooney said. "If you then take it to the next level and use AI to super-serve the individual, you drive that engagement and value further."
The compounding logic here is critical. Organisations that delay building cohort-based personalisation while waiting for perfect 1-to-1 capabilities lose years of compounding value - both in fan engagement and in commercial inventory quality.
The B2C shift and why it matters now
Cooney's overarching thesis is that sports organisations are fundamentally B2B businesses today, structured around selling rights to broadcasters and sponsorship packages to brands. The future is B2C: direct, data-informed relationships with fans that create value for both the organisation and its brand partners.
This does not necessarily mean streaming video direct to fans - a path Cooney sees as extremely difficult given the sophistication of existing broadcasters. It means building digital properties that offer genuine value to fans, capturing the behavioural data those interactions generate, and using that data to create a fan balance sheet that reflects the true economic potential of the audience.
"The whole original idea, that the fan base becomes a real balance sheet item, becomes a reality," Cooney said. "And that balance sheet isn't just about the lifetime value of the fan to the sports organisation directly. It's about lifetime value, plus the opportunity for brands to invest in that person over the duration of their fandom."
Listen to the full episode
Hear the full conversation between Aidan Cooney and Miheer Walavalkar on Future of Fandom:
A unified single view of the fan is the prerequisite for every commercial use case in sport, yet most organisations still operate with fragmented data silos.
Fan data platforms differ from standard CDPs because fan behaviour is emotional, making behavioural signals more commercially valuable than transactional data alone.
The convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing opens access to larger brand budgets, but only if rights holders can offer integrated media plans with measurable, interactive assets.
Cohort-based personalisation is the practical starting point for AI-driven fan engagement - delaying it sacrifices years of compounding value in engagement and revenue.
Organisations that treat their fan base as a balance sheet asset - and build the data infrastructure to
LiveLike, the digital fan engagement platform, is powering eight confirmed World Cup activations spanning North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, marking the company's largest simultaneous global deployment to date. The activations cover a cross-section of the sports media ecosystem, from major broadcasters and OTT platforms to payment providers and national football associations.
The deployments demonstrate LiveLike's capacity to operate at tournament scale, handling concurrent traffic spikes across time zones as billions of fans follow the world's most-watched sporting event. Activations range from prediction games (Play Predictor+) and loyalty leaderboards to trivia, squad selectors, community features, and gamified rewards programs - reflecting a broader industry shift toward interactive, data-driven engagement as rights holders look to convert passive audiences into identifiable, loyal fans.
Clients include CazeTV in Brazil, where a prediction game with their sponsor iFood is expected to generate record platform traffic, and Minute Media's Sports Illustrated, which is running a full-tournament match predictor covering every stage of the competition on its global digital platform. Additional activations are live with a leading European broadcaster operating a multi-event FanZone with gamification and a rewards shop, and a global payments company deploying wallet-based loyalty and leaderboard campaigns across Latin America.
The FA (Football Association) is using LiveLike to support its World Cup engagement strategy, while one of the largest North American and European sports media groups is using LiveLike’s whole tech stack in various ways across the world (Community, Mini-games, engagement etc…). SBS, Australia's public broadcast service has launched a complete match center experience, combining official World Cup Statistics & engagement widgets.
The scale of deployment reflects a deliberate infrastructure approach. LiveLike's platform is built to absorb the kind of unpredictable, high-volume engagement spikes that define knockout tournament football, where a single goal can trigger millions of simultaneous interactions across dozens of markets.
"The World Cup is the one event where everything has to work everywhere at once. There is no quiet period, no soft launch, no second chance," said Miheer Walavalkar, CEO and Co-Founder of LiveLike. "What we are seeing across these eight activations is proof that our platform does exactly what we built it to do: give every broadcaster, every rights holder, and every platform the tools to turn passive viewers into active fans, at whatever scale the moment demands."
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