As anyone who has been paying attention since that groundbreaking London 2012 presentation in Singapore in 2005 should be aware, traditional sport has not been as good as it used to be at doing this for a number of years now.

This has been making the industry distinctly antsy.

There might be two reasons behind sport's difficulty in engaging the youth of today in the way that it engaged, well, me and probably you, as representatives of the youth of yesterday.

Reason number one is that live premium sports action, the cream of the crop, is still focused on television, because that is where the money is.

Yet a great many tech-savvy 13 to 25 year-olds scarcely watch television. After all, these so-called "digital natives" have never known a world that was not digitised. When they consume content, be it sport-related or not, it is likely to be on a mobile device.

Reason number two - and this would be much the more serious alternative should it turn out to be true, since it would confront sport with an existential crisis, albeit in slow motion - is that the young have moved on and simply have other interests.

That sport in its traditional guises has become old hat - and, to be fair, it has had a pretty good run since the pioneering days of the mid-to-late-19th century.

Of course, there is a linkage: perhaps only reason number one is true right now and reason number two, on the whole, isn't. Yet, if nothing changes, the thesis advanced as reason number two would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Happily if I picked up one thing beside the Med over the past few days it is that this vast sector - TV Sports Markets is projecting that the global sports media rights market alone will reach almost $50 billion (£38 billion/€42.5 billion) in 2019 - is in no mood to run up the white flag without a fight.

Clearly a stupendous amount of brainpower, creativity and, in all probability, capital is being devoted to coaxing more of those standoffish millenials and members of Generation Z fully aboard the good ship Sport.

More and more clever, sophisticated content is showing up on social media platforms, aimed at persuading users to turn on to - and usually fork out for - the full live experience that has paid the industry's meal tickets for at least the past couple of decades.

The art of producing short video clips resonating with a young audience is a widespread preoccupation.

So, I report with trepidation, is the "Kardashianisation" of sports-related content. One attendee described one particular offering as "a cross between basketball and the Kardashians".

Creating content compelling enough to engage viewers sufficiently to nurture a desire to consume the premium live action, yet not compelling enough to be seen as an alternative to said live action, must, however, be a difficult path to navigate.

The immediacy of making the viewer feel as though s/he is inside, or "behind the scenes" at, the stadium or venue was often cited as one potential magic key; interactivity is another. And, of course, video has value of its own thanks to its capacity to integrate carefully-targeted advertising.

To stand any chance of maximising appeal to the under-25s, the near universal supposition in Monaco this week appeared to be, you just cannot any longer confine content related to your property to a non-interactive medium such as traditional television.

"It's not television; it's interactive," as Facebook's Rob Shaw said of the social media giant's new "Watch" video hub.

When I discussed with another video man how many viewers he told property-owning clients his company's videos would succeed in attracting to TV, the answer was broadly "none" – no-one would migrate from mobile interactive media over to old-fashioned television.

Production values at live events were also said to be changing to take account of all the viewers now accustomed to watching on small mobile screens.

Another potential obstacle was said to be that, while live sport by definition obeys an externally-imposed schedule, today's young people are in the habit of consuming the content that they want to watch when they want to watch it, i.e not at the hour prescribed by some distant sports or broadcasting executive.

In this broad context, it should come as little surprise that the question of whether social platforms would start bidding for premium live sports content, just as telecommunications companies did before them, should have been tantalising the sector for the past year or two.

Recently, after a number of sorties into live action by social players, a potentially game-changing move finally materialised in the shape of Facebook's - unsuccessful - bid for digital rights to cricket's Indian Premier League.

"Although it ultimately failed," wrote TV Sports Markets, Facebook's bid is "hugely significant…it is the biggest reported move in sports media rights to date by one of the tech giants".

And yet, here in Monaco, I was part of an audience that was told by Facebook's Shaw: "We don’t want a war of attrition".

One is obliged to ponder how to reconcile those two things - Facebook's eye-catching bid and Shaw's eye-catching assertion.

It is no more than a punt, but I wonder if one short-term possibility might be a future in which social media platforms such as Facebook, with its extraordinary reach and data generation capacity, explicitly team up with one or more broadcast partners to table joint bids for premium properties.

We will have to wait and see, I suppose – and the landscape of this always fast-moving sector has probably never been shifting as rapidly or unpredictably.

"How it all pans out is anyone's guess," was a not atypical comment.

In the meantime, many of those soaking up Monte Carlo's copious supplies of autumn sunshine this week would welcome any indication that that youth engagement elephant is starting to tiptoe towards the exit.