How Pro Sports Leagues Are Leveling Up Their Content with Active Archives

Action is the name of the game in sports and today’s fans can watch history-making plays anytime, anywhere thanks to digital media. A growing demand for engaging content from the latest games and fan-favorite players is driving sports organizations to rethink the way they store, manage, and use their data.  

Active archive cloud storage allows sports media owners to unlock the full potential of their massive stores of data. Active archiving can create new revenue streams, enhance marketing, and boost fan engagement. It’s a cost-effective, scalable solution that can transform sports media data management and data usage. 

Data types in sports media management 

Sports organizations handle a number of different types of content: real-time game footage, historical “greatest moments,” and player interviews and commentaries. Each data type has different requirements for storage, access, and associated use cases.   

Hot data 

Hot data is the most active and frequently accessed type of data in a sports media organization. It includes live game feeds, instant highlights, and social media content as well as any footage that is currently in use by editors or other content creators. Hot data requires fast access and high read/write speeds to keep up with the frequent demand. Most organizations store hot data on premises-based infrastructure to maintain that immediate access.  

Warm data 

Warm data is accessed by users less frequently than hot data but still plays an important role in regular operations. This could include highlights from recent games, promotional material, or data used for analysis. Because warm data might be accessed on a monthly or quarterly basis, it doesn’t require instant access speeds, though it is readily available when needed. 

Cold data 

Cold data is content that is accessed very infrequently, such as archived games from past seasons, historical footage, and data stored long-term for compliance purposes. Because it’s accessed once a year or even less frequently, it doesn’t require quick retrieval speeds. Performance is a low priority for cold data storage, as it is most often used for long-term retention.   

Managing data in sports media organizations: The Goldilocks zone 

Sports team owners and media managers must formulate their data strategy based on a deep understanding of each data type and its needs. Because costs are closely tied to performance rates, organizations are tasked with finding the right storage balance to keep costs as low as possible without compromising on performance.   

However, sports media organizations are realizing that most of their data isn’t hot or cold but lies in the middle of the spectrum. Data in this “Goldilocks zone” is neither too hot nor too cold, but warm enough to be used across a wide range of applications and workloads. A key finding in the 2025 Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index report illustrates data is increasingly hotter across all industries, not just sports media, with only 19% of cloud-stored data classified as cold.  

Organizations are doing more with their data, in sports and beyond, with 48% of cloud object storage sitting in the Goldilocks zone. The majority of the data sports media organizations need to manage sits here and drives many organizations to re-evaluate how their data is stored and accessed.  

Creating a storage strategy that fits your growth 

Once media owners understand the nuance in their data access strategy, it’s important to ensure that the bulk of this data—which is warm—remains easily accessible to support both immediate needs and future growth. You’ll need to find cloud data storage that doesn’t charge a fee every time you access that data because those fees add up quickly.  

Cloud tiering develops your active archives by managing data storage and placing content into different access tiers based on frequency of use, age, and other factors, which change over time. With hot data stored in the most high-performance infrastructure, typically on-prem, the remaining data is automatically tiered to more cost-efficient cloud storage tiers to free up on-prem storage. When the file is tiered, it leaves behind a “stub,” so content owners don’t lose track of it; the file appears in the same place using the familiar storage hierarchy as before, even though its data is stored securely in the cloud. 

A hybrid cloud tiering strategy gives content owners the best of both worlds: an on-prem workstation that never runs out of space, and an accessible library in the cloud to house all their finished work.  

Case study: Premier Lacrosse League (PLL) 

The Premier Lacrosse League (PLL) is a professional lacrosse league with teams that travel across the U.S., playing matches, gaining fans, and energizing the sport’s growing popularity. In addition to capturing and storing footage of the league’s current games, PLL also received an enormous volume of legacy footage on tape from Major League Lacrosse that they began to digitize.

The league chose Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage for cost-effective object storage and integrated it with its existing iconik media asset manager. Now, as the legacy footage is digitized, it is tiered to the Wasabi cloud, leaving the PLL’s most high-performance infrastructure on-premises free to store frequently accessed hot data.  

If that data is ever needed, it can be quickly retrieved from the cloud, even on the road, for real-time access no matter if you are on the sideline or in the editor’s room. Their bi-coastal team of editors can access footage as soon as it is ingested—all without spending a penny more. They also bolstered their cyber resilience with a second copy of their content in Wasabi, an insurance policy against any possible local storage failures.  

Put the active back in archive 

As the desire for on-demand digital content grows, sports media organizations are re-evaluating data storage and its levels of accessibility. Now it’s possible to give new life to your archival material by storing it in low-cost, accessible “warm” cloud storage. This shift in data availability can help create new revenue opportunities, increase fan engagement, enhance content creation from editors and other creators, and may even be the spark that invigorates your audience. 

Join Wasabi at SportsPro New York, March 20–21 or see how we can help you unlock more value in your stored sports data.