14
CONNECTING WITH MOBILE/SOCIAL AUDIENCES THROUGH NATIVE VIDEO BUILDING GLOBAL SPORTS BRANDS IN A DIGITAL WORLD
CONNECTING WITH MOBILE/SOCIAL AUDIENCES THROUGH NATIVE VIDEO
BUILDING GLOBAL SPORTS BRANDS IN A DIGITAL WORLD
“We’re clearly at the very beginning of mobile video sharing,”
Dick Costolo, ex-CEO at Twitter
“The fact that we have this much consumer video on Facebook means we have an opportunity to grow our ad business and that’s exciting for marketers,”
Sheryl Sandberg, COO at Facebook
“Video, along with mobile, social, and native, is driving a surge in digital advertising.”
Marissa Meyer, CEO at Yahoo
“If it’s starting to feel like every visit you make to Facebook these days is full of videos, you are not alone.”
TechCrunch
“We’re focused on three top priorities: mobile, mobile and mobile!”
Susan Wojcicki, CEO YouTube
3
INTRODUCTION
There are more than two billion smartphone users
worldwide and 4G networks will cover more than a third
of the global population by the end of 2015. Thanks to
these advances in mobile computing and with the leading
social networks now ofering native video formats, 2015 is the year that mobile video is mainstream. As the sports
industry contends with increasing competition for audience, accelerating globalisation, digitisation of fan bases and demand for revenue diversiication, social video presents signiicant opportunity. This report will examine why major sports rights holders, such as the National Football League (NFL), Wimbledon and LaLiga, are bringing real-time video content onto social platforms. It will also examine the opportunities that exist for rights holders looking to build their global brands, activate new audiences and grow revenues.
THE BUSINESS OF SPORT IN THE 21ST CENTURY
The value of sport in the twenty-irst century media and broadcast markets is unquestioned: broadcasters, pay-TV companies, mobile operators, broadband service providers, technology businesses, publishers and media companies all want to own, distribute and monetize sports content. Sport dominates live “event” television, where consumers (‘passionate fans’) have demonstrated that they will pay for content. Despite concerns regarding
cord- cutting, time-shifted viewing and the rise of digital and mobile platforms for sports consumption, recent TV deals for premium sport have bucked the trend and
risen at inlation-busting levels to reach new highs in multiple markets. The recent ESPN, Turner deal with the National Basketball Association (NBA) was worth $24bn over 10 years, which is 2.8 times higher than the previous deal based on the average annual combined payments.
Meanwhile the Sky Sports and BT Sport deal with the English Premier League (EPL) in March 2015 was worth £5.1bn over 3 years, a 70% increase on the previous cycle.
The new broadcast deal for the EPL is good for clubs and teams – the ‘bottom club’ in the Premier League in the 2016/17 season could take revenue equivalent to a top 10 team from the previous year; yet club’s are sufering from their own inlation concerns in the form of transfer prices and player wages. The proitability challenge for European clubs is compounded by the new UEFA regulations for Financial Fair Play (FFP), which state that clubs competing in the region must operate within a ixed boundary of its annual revenue and operating proit. In order to maintain their power in the transfer market, clubs must either balance the books by buying and selling players in
tandem (to ensure that income from player sales ofsets the cost of new acquisitions), bring an increasing number of players through from their youth academies that can
be sold on to other clubs at a proit as they mature, expand their commercial operations and grow alternative revenue streams. The size of Premier League grounds are increasing, ticket prices are rising and merchandise sales and sponsorships are ever more important to clubs in this
regard.
REVENUE DIVERSIFICATION: THE NEXT BILLION
FANS
Whilst there has been evidence to suggest that the top football clubs in Europe are looking to operate a more
balanced transfer system (value of players in = value of
players out), the option to diversify revenue streams and expand income is attractive. Options available include:
• Activation and engagement of a global fan base to
drive merchandise sales and sponsorship deals
• Direct to consumer content and service propositions
that supplement revenues from existing TV and broadcast deals
Smartphones
People online
2020201420001995
2
1
3
4
ANOTHER BILLION PEOPLE ONLINE - ALL DUE TO SMARTPHONES
Source: World Bank, GSMA, a16z, ITU
£5.1bn
£3bn
$24bn
$8.6bn
Previous cycle
New deal
NBA
English Premier League(Sky Sports + BT Sport)
(ESPN + Turner) +280%
+70%
Source: FT.com, bbc.co.uk
Growth to 2020
2014
ConsumerPCs
PCs Smart phones
Online pops
Mobile Literate adults
Adults PopulationTV audience
2
1
4
3
5
6
78
THE WORLD IN 2020 - 80% OF ADULTS OWN A SMARTPHONE
4
years. The challenge of latlining growth is exacerbated by demographic trends for primary rights owners: the
NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball (MLB), National Hockey League (NHL), EPL and LaLiga all operate in markets where demographic expansion is slowing - a stark contract to the massive and rapidly expanding consumer populations in Asia, Central and Southern America and Africa.
The scale of the opportunity in emerging markets is a
combination of the volume of the potential audience (more
than 2bn consumers in China and India alone) and the acceleration of the ‘emerging middle class’ who are the
key targets for globalizing sports: these consumers are wealthier, have an interest in western culture and sports, are more likely to own a smartphone and are active on
digital and social platforms. These are the next ‘billon(+) consumers’ and the race is on to turn them into passionate
fans of premium sports. The EPL has an advantage as football (soccer) has been broadcast extensively in these markets for many years and football is a highly popular
sport – in South East Asia, Latin America and Africa. Nevertheless, the major US leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) are increasingly focused on these territories adding to the
competition for audience, fan engagement and revenue.
The globalization of sports is not just an emerging market story: US sports franchises are looking to Europe to build
a new audience – such as the recent NFL games held in London and NBA games taking place across Europe for example - and the EPL and LaLiga are looking back to the
• Expansion of the range and scope of deals with talent to maximize the increasing commercial power of the players (and their sizeable fan base)
• Provision of new sponsorship and advertising assets –
driven by digital propositions (global, regional, local)
• Greater exploitation of customer (fan base) data to maximise the value and eicacy of traditional revenue streams (e.g. ticketing, hospitality, merchandise).
Building a global fan base and extending the reach and value of sports beyond
the strongest domestic markets is a key
commercial objective for the leading sports leagues and federations.
The inancial results of the top football (soccer) clubsin Europe this year illustrates that the impact of rising
broadcast income, combined with a focus on revenue diversiication, is beginning to pay dividends. TheEnglish Premier League (EPL) consolidated its position as the world’s most powerful football league in 2013-14 as the 20 EPL clubs generated record income of £3.26bn, outstripping second place Bundesliga in Germany by more than £1bn.
In the irst year of the Premier League’s 2013-16 television deals, which total £5.5bn, a review of football inance by Deloitte highlighted that TV income alone was €171m (£126m) more than the entire income of Spain’s LaLiga clubs, €405m more than the total earnings of Italy’s Serie A clubs and €606m more than the income of France’s Ligue 1 clubs. Indeed, these commercial opportunities are not limited to sports clubs and teams.
Indeed, these commercial opportunities are not limited to sports clubs and teams. Broadcast TV deals have remained strong in domestic markets for most leading sports, but the scale of the overall fan base and TV viewing audience
in these markets has not changed markedly in recent
4bn
1.44bn
1.1bn
3.7bn
906m
3.85bn
1.26bn
980m
3.4bn
795m2014 2015
Total population
Active internet usetts
Social media users
Mobile connections
Mobile social users
+3.7%
+14.3%
+12.2%
+11.2%
+11.2%
DIGITAL AND SOCIAL USER GROWTH: ASIA-PAC (2014-15)
Source: Wikipedia, InternerLiveStats, InternetWorldStats, Government data: Facebook, Tencent, Vkontakte,
LiveInternet; GSMA Intelligence
LaLi
ga C
lubs
inco
me
EPL
TV in
com
e
Ligu
e 1
Club
s in
com
e
Se
rie
A C
lub
s in
com
e
€7.3
9bn
€6
.96
bn
€7.1
6bn
€7.5
7bn
MAJOR EUROPEAN LEAGUES: BROADCAST REVENUES
5
growth opportunity in North America driven by the growing interest in soccer highlighted by the nationwide success of
FIFA World Cup 2014.
Whilst the leagues are scheduling friendlies and a number of regular season games in overseas markets, it is much easier for clubs and federations to engage a global fan
base using digital and social platforms. The scale of the
social fan base for some of the top football clubs in Europe
relects this already; a combined audience of hundreds of millions of users. The scope of the holistic digital fan base is
immense: Manchester United claim that they have >500m
fans worldwide and FC Barcelona claim to have engaged with >300m fans across digital platforms. Connecting a
global audience presents opportunities for clubs and
leagues to sell content, merchandise and other services to this rapidly growing fan base around the globe.
Despite the recent expansion in the value of commercial broadcast and TV rights for
the major leagues, there is growing concern that these revenues will peak as TV viewing
plateaus and consumption accelerates on
other digital and connected platforms - with mobile at the heart of this growth.
THE GLOBAL FAN BASE: FC BARCELONA FACEBOOK FANS BY COUNTRY (MAR 2015)
Source: SocialBakers
Millions of fans
%
%
%
%
%%
%
%
%
%
DIRECT TO CONSUMER: OVER-THE-TOP (OTT)
Global sports federations such as the MLB and NFL, as well as many of the leading clubs and teams, use digital platforms as an opportunity to engage with a global
audience and provide direct-to-consumer content/ services across multiple platforms. Examples include NFL Mobile and NFL Now, NBA League Pass, MLB Game Pass, NHL Gamecenter, MUTV, Liverpool FC Go and Real Madrid TV.
The irst wave of direct to consumer video services launched by the major European football clubs were TV channels delivered via pay-TV satellite and cable operators (e.g. MUTV and ChelseaTV made available to satellite
subscribers for an additional monthly fee). However, clubs require carriage agreements with broadcasters in each
target country to scale these services internationally and
as such OTT services can be more attractive; they can be delivered to fans anywhere in the world via the internet and
connected devices; and they enable a direct relationship
between the club and its fans.
The success of the internet-based OTT services for clubs and teams has been mixed to date. A number of EPL clubs still ofer this as a paid-subscription service (such as Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool) but other leading clubs such as Arsenal have made the service free to
fans that register their email details:
• The ‘bar’ for paid-subscription services is getting higher all the time – most club subscriptions are at the same
price point as Netlix (which ofers consumers original content and thousands of movies and TV shows – not
just news, highlights and limited access to live games)
• A subscription service is ‘always-on’ and requires exclusive, high-value content to be delivered in to the channel 365 days per year. The availability of
these services on larger-screen devices (e.g. via Apple TV, Roku, Xbox, Playstation, Chromecast etc.) also puts more pressure on the clubs to spend more on
production – cutting into margins and production
lexibility
• YouTube has built a strong relationship with many
of the clubs, encouraging them to engage with their global fan base via their YouTube channel – all of these
services are ofered free to consumers with advertising sold by YouTube and shared with the clubs
The other factor inluencing the OTT strategy for clubs and teams is the growing importance of social platforms
as destinations for video content discovery, consumption and sharing. Subscription and pay-per-view (PPV) video propositions are not available as native experiences on social media given the open and viral nature of these
platforms. The growth of Facebook video has been particularly important, giving teams the opportunity to share short-form videos with millions of fans across the globe using Facebook as the distribution channel. The
6
curation and discovery role that Facebook plays in the video ecosystem is key as the data that Facebook carries on users makes it easy to identify fans of a speciic sport or team and surface relevant content within their feeds.Moreover, video
shared using the native video player on the social platform
performs 20-30x better than videos hosted on a club’s own
website (or YouTube channel).
THE GROWTH OF MOBILE (AND SOCIAL)
AUDIENCES
Nearly half of the world’s adult population now owns a smartphone; by 2020, it will be 80%. Mobile app usage dominates digital media consumption and Facebook is the most popular app of all. With the shift to mobile continuing apace, social mobile apps such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat will play an increasingly important role in the
media industry.
As social platforms have evolved, a common theme has emerged: from text and links to photos and now videos.
Facebook video was reinvented by the ice bucket challenge – a global video event played out on the social web.
Twitter now have over 130 media partners for its premium
sponsored video programme (Twitter Amplify) and recently rolled out native video within its app to make a play to use
video as the driver of premium content and advertising on
its platform. Snapchat has launched generated content
and videos ads within its Snapchat Discover feature that
showcases content from media partners such as Vice and
MTV as well as video curated from users within its Live Stories section.
Meanwhile, YouTube has evolved to become both a platform and rights owner and is nurturing a stable of
new ‘YouTube stars’ whose subscriber numbers dwarf the
population of many countries. With a mission to maximize their ad revenues, the vastly superior ad rates for premium video formats are irresistible.
Facebook counts over 1.4bn users, 844m of which access the platform using their mobile
everyday with 50% of users watching at least one video daily
Facebook’s scale means the social media audience for broadcasters and rights holders has received a signiicant and timely boost, it counts over 1.4bn users, 844m of which access the platform using their mobile everyday. Twitter
now has over 300m monthly active users, Snapchat has
“Five years ago Facebook was all
about text, today it’s all about
images, in ive years it will be about video.”
(Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook - Feb 2015)
Source: YouTube Statistics / Reuters (2013) , Facebook Insights (2014), Grabyo platform metrics
25% 50-65%
User generated UGC / Premium
2012 2015
4bn
THE RISE OF SOCIAL VIDEO
8.4bn
4b
4b
n
n
7
more than 100m and YouTube has over a billion users
logging in each month and half of these are mobile.
These vast numbers exclude the hundreds of millions of users that access video via other social platforms and
messaging apps including WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, Tango, Instagram, Vine, Tumblr, Tencent, Sina Weibo and more.
NATIVE VIDEO AND SOCIAL DISCOVERY
For social platforms competing to dominate video consumption, user experience matters. Every click away from an app, timeline or newsfeed can mean thousands, if not millions, of lost views. This is why Twitter, Facebook and other platforms have spent so much time and money
building their own native digital propositions for their users.
If you provide the best video solution ‘on platform’ you are
likely to attract the best content (and advertising partners); but more importantly, you create the best experience, which in turn leads to higher engagement. Facebook launched its own (native) video player to ensure that a Facebook video experience is ‘the best video experience’ on Facebook. Facebook’s rapid growth to more than 4bn video views a day in a little over 12 months shows how efective this strategy has been.
Native video has always been the most successful way to deliver a great video
experience, particularly for short-form, and especially on mobile.
YouTube was the irst platform to build a native experience and then consolidate within applications owned and
managed by Google; the move away from an integrated
experience within iOS for example driven by the desire to control the UX and advertising experience on mobile. One of the deining aspects of the YouTube video ecosystem is that although it’s relatively simple for content owners to
publish content to YouTube and embed a YouTube video
in their website or apps, the video experience presented to the user is a ‘YouTube’ experience and not a white label service. When a clip ends viewers are recommended other videos to watch from YouTube, or encouraged to subscribe to a YouTube channel, thus reinforcing the need for content owners to publish more content to the YouTube
platform.
Facebook and Twitter extend this concept by providing a social video discovery service as part of their native
video proposition. Facebook knows a lot about its users, from opt-in engagement data such as ‘likes, comments and shares’ in addition to how they spend their time
and attention within the newsfeed. The picture of user
behaviour is further enhanced by data coming from
millions of mobile apps that use Facebook Open Graph for authentication and login. As such Facebook can use this data to present videos to its users that are both relevant
and in context - which means users are much more likely to watch them. Thanks to Facebook’s algorithm and the reinforcing behaviour of the viral content loop, the most popular content also remains in the user’s newsfeed even
as new content is shared.
5.000
3.750
2.500
1.250
010 20 30 40
Facebook native player
3rd party video player
AV
ER
AG
E V
IEW
S/H
OU
R
SOCIAL VIDEO CONSUMPTION (FACEBOOK): NATIVE VS. NON-NATIVE PLAYER
Source: Grabyo Q1 2015
Messenger / Chat APP / VOIP
Social Network
Facebook Messenger
Baidu Tieba
Qzone
TUMBLR
Google+
Sina Weibo
Line
Viber
Skype
Vkontakte
Snapchat
1.366
629
343
829
600
500
468
300
209
170
300
284
230
230
157
100
100
ACTIVE USERS BY SOCIAL PLATFORM - GLOBAL 2015
Source: We are social analysis of Facebook data, Q1 2015; latest company statements, correct as 17 Jan 2015
8
In July earlier this year Facebook announced that it would be introducing a new pilot feature called ‘Suggested Videos’, an alternative News Feed dedicated to videos, in order to explore engagement and potential video monetisaiton on the platform. Once a user has watched a video from their newsfeed, a list of algorithmically created ‘high quality’ video suggestions appear from media partners such as Fox Sports and the NBA, interspersed with regular content. This new functionality will likely lead to increased engagement
levels by presenting relevant, premium videos to users and the advertising experience is similar to traditional television with video adverts added as interstitials between clips.
Facebook has already closed its irst deals with the likes of NBA, Hearst, Fox Sports and Funny or Die for this pilot programme with the business model based on publishing
partners taking a share of 55% of revenue generated by the video ads sold by Facebook that appear alongside their content.
Using their growing knowledge of user data to surface
relevant content and advertisements in the suggested
videos feed, Facebook can deliver mutual beneits for both the viewer and content owners. This new model may turn
out to be a major source of revenue growth for Facebook within the next year, considering the rapid growth of video consumption on the Facebook platform.
Social is now a destination for content, not just a communications and discovery tool.
Twitter is now working on its own feature “Project Lightning” to enhance video discovery and bring users the most
relevant content, rather than simply the latest tweets. Examples of this trend include video recommendations and “whilst you were away” lists of relevant content which are
already live within the Twitter mobile apps.
A recent study by BuzzFeed highlights the importanceof using the social platforms as channels rather than
mechanisms to drive traic to rights holder’s owned and operated digital platforms. Whilst the volume of traic sourced from social networks is impressive – Facebook alone drove 350m visits to BuzzFeed in 2014 – this traic is dwarfed by the volume of engagement generated by native
consumption on the social platforms themselves.
AUTOPLAY: SOCIAL VIDEO’S SECRET WEAPON
Building on Facebook’s understanding of user behaviour and interests, the platform has delivered a simple, yet highly efective user experience for getting customers to watch more video – autoplay. This is the single most
important feature in the recent history of online (and
especially mobile) video. This is not a new trick. For years we have turned on our TV in “autoplay mode” and
understood this to be the standard experience for watching video. In many ways it is surprising that it took so long to
reach the digital ecosystem. The data shows that it works.
The success of autoplay on Facebook prompted Twitter to launch its own autoplay variant as part of the native Twitter
video experience for users on Twitter.com and mobile apps. No such plans have been announced by YouTube, but it would seem likely that the platform may test this
feature at some point in the future, particularly for mobile users or in combination with its Google search driven
experiences (OneBox and Google Now).
THE VALUE FOR RIGHTS HOLDERS
The NFL was among the early partners for Twitter Amplify, the social network’s lagship initiative to bring sponsored video content from media companies and rights holders
Source: Buzzfeed 2015
IMPRESSIONS IN THE STREAMREFERRALS TO BUZZFEED
349M
12.5M
60M
11.3B
847M
6.4B
Source: Facebook 2015
9
onto its platform. As a result, the NFL enjoyed digital engagement at a scale typically unavailable outside of
television and has generated signiicant revenue from brand partners. In December 2014, the NFL partnered with Facebook to deliver real-time video content from live games through the Championship play-ofs and the Superbowl with the clips sponsored by Verizon and Salesforce and viewable to all of Facebook’s users in the U.S.A.
The digital video rights owned by the NFL are understood to be some of the most valuable sports rights in the world
- so why are major rights holders like the NFL sharing content for ‘free’ on social platforms?
Rights holders have been evaluating social platforms as video publishing destinations in response to key trends
in user behaviour and media attention. Firstly, millions of consumers visit social platforms such as Facebook up to 15x per day - no publisher or rights holder is likely to command this level of engagement for its own website or
mobile apps. Secondly, the viral nature of social platforms means that when social media users discover a great
piece of content, it is distributed far more quickly and broadly than a publisher could achieve through traditional
channels. Video is also becoming an increasingly important
part of the social ecosystem; it drives increased dwell
time, engagement and higher advertising and sponsorship revenues.
Rights holders are also building scalable audiences on social platforms that are
always-on and span multiple geographies and demographic groups worldwide.
Chelsea FC has 40m fans on Facebook, this is nearly 1000x more people than could it into its Stamford Bridge stadium for an average game (and probably higher than the total
number of football fans in the UK). FC Barcelona has 98m fans across Facebook and Twitter, Real Madrid has 87m fans, Manchester United has 70m...the list goes on. Sharing video content with these audiences generates signiicant reach and consumption; both with the initial spike in real- time engagement and the proliferation of viral sharing
throughout the following 24-48hrs as users from diferent parts of the globe discover, view and share the clips with friends. This process is enhanced by Facebook’s discovery and curation (EdgeRank) algorithms, which recognise this spike in content engagement and surface clips to a relevant
user community.
The Facebook pilot deal with the NFL and Verizon, the growing scale of Twitter Amplify, the deals between YouTube and major rights holders such as the NFL, NBA, NHL and LaLiga and the launch of Discover and Stories on Snapchat, highlights that it is now possible to monteise short-form video on the largest platforms.
Total
Real Madrid
LA Lakers
Arsenal
Galatasaray
Manchester United
Chicago bulls
Bayern Munich
Barcelona
Manchester City
PSG
Liverpool
Fenerbahce
Chelsea
Miami Heat
Milan
84.2 101.2
66.2 72.17
31.9 34.22
86.7 102.6
43.4 49.44
33.4 39.68
26.1 30.85
24.5 27.31
16 19.5
10.43 14.45
21.2 25.9
19.5
20.5
22.17
23.04
17.9 20.24
12.5 18.2
17
5.97
6.28
15.9
6.04
4.75
2.67
2.54
2.81
3.15
4.02
2.32
2.34
4.47
5.7
WORL’S MOST POPULAR SPORTS TEAMS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
10
The ability to target fans using paid media campaigns
on social networks is also important from a commercial
perspective. Brand sponsors can beneit from a wave of initial distribution for the content or campaign, driven by the scale and organic reach of the rights holder whose
videos carry their advertising message. The reach of this
content can then be ampliied through paid media buying across each target social platform. The resulting huge
volume of engagement is good for content owners too:
it builds following and reach, activates key sponsorship and advertising messages, engages fans through organic, earned and paid-media and enhances the value of future campaigns.
In sport it is not only the rights holders that have a
substantial following on social media; the athletes
themselves have large and, more importantly, highly engaged social audiences. Sports stars are able to
accelerate viral distribution and social discovery of content
through their unparalleled reach and superior engagement.
Each time an athlete shares a piece of content on
Facebook, many thousands (or even millions) of fans consume and re-share their posts, generating rapid spikes in real-time engagement, multiplying reach and extending the lifetime of content. ‘Talent-as-a-channel’ is important for the redistribution and ampliication of content owned by rights holders, but also as a mechanism for the athlete’s to share their own unique content with their audience, building the scale of their fan base and supporting sponsor
activation and brand endorsements.
Video engagement on social is higher than
any other content type (such as text or video) therefore video content has a greater chance
of surfacing in a newsfeed or timeline.
SHARE OF NUMBER OF VIDEO POSTS 2014
Source: Grabyo Q1 2015
11
Major sports stars are capable of building social fan bases of tens of millions of consumers and social video provides
exciting new opportunities for expanding the rangeand scope of sponsorship deals in this emerging digital
channel. Rights holders can guarantee millions of clip views via their organic audience on social platforms.
The additional opportunity multiply this engagement
via talent- based distribution marks a signiicant new commercial opportunity for talent and rights holders alike.
The inluence of stars is not only attractive to sponsors wanting to leverage their athlete partnerships and activate
endorsement deals, but also for global brands wanting to connect TV activity and sports sponsorship with social apps
around major live events.
Given social video is now a key consideration
for any integrated media campaign, the profound impact that talent can have on
media discovery and distribution becomes
enormously valuable to global brands.
SO WHAT ROLE COULD SOCIAL VIDEO PLAY IN
THE FUTURE FOR RIGHTS HOLDERS AND BRANDS?
Video consumption on social platforms has grown
exponentially in the last twelve months, reaching scale which compares with the reach of traditional TV.
Thanks to the power of native video and
social discovery on Facebook and Twitter, rights holders are now generating millions of
video views from individual real-time clips.
Yet this is just the beginning of social video evolution – just a handful of major rights holders are sharing content and the social video ecosystem continues to change.
A signiicant percentage of the world’s population regularly checks into social apps. The native formats of these can
be enhanced by the unparalleled social inluence of stars and clubs all of which can be used to accelerate media
discovery and distribution.
Real-time social video will play a very powerful role in building global fan bases and driving audience activation in
years to come.
Before we are able to fully leverage the value of social media as a key channel for video distribution and
engagement, there are a number of key questions that need to be answered:
• What is the relationship between fan engagement and revenue in this new social video ecosystem?
• What are the opportunities for club’s and leagues to build new commercial models and revenue streams
using social video?
• How do these emerging social video commercial opportunities integrate with traditional sponsorship
deals sold by the clubs and leagues?
• What are the trade ofs in income and margin for clubs that choose to share content, and commercialise this content, via social platforms rather than traditional owned-and-operated properties?
• Are there other opportunities to build value for the
club beyond digital sponsorships and advertising?
Fan engagement :• 20x higher than broadcasters• 3-5x higher than rights holders
894k Views
24k Likes
300 Comments
12
SOCIAL VIDEO CASE STUDY: ATP MEDIA (TENNISTV)
As the combined oicial live video streaming service of the ATP World Tour and WTA - men’s and women’s respective governing bodies for tennis - TennisTV broadcasts more than 2,000 live matches a year across website, mobile and tablet.
Goals:
• Create and share exciting moments from oicial tennis coverage in real-time
• Drive social engagement through real-time video
• Promote the TennisTV brand and oicial live streaming services
Strategy: TennisTV partnered with Grabyo in 2014 to
share the best rallies and most dazzling shots from the courts on Facebook in real time.
How: During live tennis matches the editorial team at
TennisTV use Grabyo to instantly capture the most exciting moments from oicial live streams as they happen and share them in real time to their fans on Facebook. All videos are served in the Facebook native video player with auto-play functionality and integrated Call to Action (CTA) to promote the TennisTV brand and drive viewers to watch
more oicial TennisTV content via web and connected devices. In addition, Grabyo’s Facebook Video API integration enables TennisTV to take advantage of
features including content scheduling, expiration and geo-
NEW NATIVE VIDEO DELIVERY: VASTLY INCREASED VIDEO VIEWS AND ENGAGEMENT:
OLD NON-NATIVE VIDEO DELIVERY, LESS VIDEO VIEWS AND ENGAGEMENT:
gating.
Results: The combined power of social discovery, auto-play and the viral distribution and strong user engagement of
Facebook native video led to:
• 95% increase in video views in less than 6 months
• 44m users reached on Facebook in irst four months of 2015
• 90m video impressions in Q1 2015
• Page likes up 72% YoY
• The average organic reach of a native video post was
four times higher than a photo post
• Total post engagement for native video was 13x higher than for photos
• Total engagement for native video was more than
3x higher than any other content type on TennisTV’s Facebook posts
Moreover, the switch to using Facebook native video, rather than a third party player, has led to a signiicant increase in engagement and reach for TennisTV’s real-time video clips:
13
REFERENCES
BBC (2015). Premier League in record £5.14bn TV rights deal. [Online]. BBC Business. Avaialble from: http://www. bbc.co.uk/news/business-31379128.
Facebook. Statistics. [Online]. Available from: http:// newsroom.fb.com/company-info/. (Accessed on 16th September 2015).
Ericsson (2015). Ericsson Mobility Report: On the Pulse of the Networked Society.
ESPN (2014). NBA extends television deals. [Online] ESPN. Available from: http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/ id/11652297/nba-extends-television-deals-espn-tnt.
Kemp, S. (2015). Digital, Social, and Mobile in APAC 2015. We Are Social. Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/ wearesocialsg/digital-social-mobile-in-apac-in-2015.
Kemp, S. (2015). Digital, Social and Mobile Worldwide in 2015. We Are Social. Available from: http://wearesocial.net/ blog/2015/01/digital-social-mobile-worldwide-2015/.
Oreskovic, A. (2012). YouTube hits 4 billion daily video views. [Online]. Reuters. Available from: http://www. reuters.com/article/2012/01/23/us-google-youtube- idUSTRE80M0TS20120123.
Peretti, J. (2015). Lessons from Buzzfeed. SXSW.
Rodriguez, S. (2015). Snapchat now gets 4 billion video views per day and is challenging Facebook video. [Online]. Business Insider. Available from: http://www. businessinsider.com/snapchat-gets-4-billion-video-views- per-day-2015-9?IR=T.
SocialBakers. (2015). FC Barcelona Facebook Statistics. Available from: http://www.socialbakers.com/statistics/
facebook/pages/detail/197394889304-fc-barcelona.
The Economist (2015). Planet of the phones: The smartphone is ubiquitous, addictive and transformative.
[Online]. Available from: http://www.economist.com/news/ leaders/21645180-smartphone-ubiquitous-addictive-and- transformative-planet-phones.
The Guardian (2015). Premier League top of the rich list with record income of £3.26bn. [Online]. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/jun/04/premier- league-tv-income-la-liga-deloitte.
CONTACT US
GrabyoTV
@Grabyo
about.grabyo.com
