57 ROUND TABLE Sports streaming
ours. Whatever you discover or dream up, don’t be afraid to innovate. Going back to my earlier storytelling point, you want viewers and listeners to experience your sport as truly as possible. And if sound is such a USP of yours, don’t leave yourself with a missed opportunity to convey what it’s like for a viewer to be at the event. Get innovating and experimenting! CHUMS: How can we better engage fans using our social platforms, particularly around game time? OLALLA CERNUDA: We use the social media platforms to try to engage with our followers and drive them to the OTT platform, especially a few minutes before the start of a race. We give them extra content, features, interviews and a little preview of what they can get if they subscribe. We also make packages per event, race, week, month or the whole season, so that people have multiple different opportunities to join the community. Of course, we also offer some free content, again to try to get their attention. We also engage with other organisers to extend our reach and try to reach out to new audiences. LIAM J. HAYTER: Social media integration with a dedicated ‘back channel’ can really add something – but here, having some great moderators will always be critical. It’s now easier than ever to have a live two-way dialogue with the fans – just look at egaming streaming services like Twitch for an example of how other content creators do this brilliantly (and not so brilliantly!) with a lively live back channel.
With streaming, it’s not just an outward push of content anymore, so having a dedicated social media team that keep up with fan interaction, and handling criticisms well, is an important part of ongoing engagement. CHARLIE PRICHARD: It’s all about collaboration and understanding. Understand what makes the experience of your event stand out through all your various stakeholders (staff, fans, attendees, broadcasters, sponsors Commercially, you stand to gain so much by getting as many people as possible to attend the event. So if you can push and promote audio-visual content (live and on-demand, long-form and short-form) to engage casual viewers and convert them into fans through a positive experience, then you stand a really great chance of turning them into potential customers going forward. More is more here: the more content you can film, the more you have to work with, the more you have to offer, and the greater your opportunities will be for engagement and monetisation. So be creative. Use multiple channels to reach the broadest audience possible. And do so in a fun and targeted way that shows the sport in its true light and how it is unlike any other. CHUMS: Thanks so much, experts! This has been a big help! Now, just one more thing – would you like to come and help us feed the sharks before you go...? etc) and then all the stakeholders collaborating to bring that to life.
OLALLA CERNUDA: This year we have started providing English commentary in all our races that didn’t have English as their native language, sending a commentator to our facilities in Stockholm where the feeds are being produced, and this has increased engagement considerably. We are now testing an application called Spalk and we are offering, for all our events, live commentary in Spanish. In the upcoming months we will add another five languages. LIAM J. HAYTER: Audio is probably the single most important thing you must get right. It doesn’t matter how polished the imagery is if the audio lets you down. Your priorities really should be as follows: audio, video, then graphics. CHARLIE PRICHARD: However challenging the conditions, there are innovations out there that provide solutions. This might mean multiple inputs or novel microphones to capture the full sound experience, which would then seamlessly integrate with an interface like
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