How to Build and Monetize Your Sports Video App

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Until recently, live sports was one of the last remaining industries to transition to online streaming and over-the-top (OTT) services. Viewers were often beholden to pricey cable subscriptions in order to catch a buzzer-beating basket or tune in to a local baseball season opener. Even today, 42% of cable subscribers only keep their subscription in order to watch live sports.

But the landscape is changing, and the sports industry is now embracing OTT (named as such because it goes over the top of traditional television services) as a new source of increased revenue and viewership. There is no clearer indicator of this shift than the $130 million deal Amazon made with the NFL in April 2018 to stream 11 season games to their Prime Video service.

From small businesses to national teams, sports organizations of all shapes and sizes are partnering with Vimeo to succeed in this emerging space. Research shows that consumers are eager to follow, too, with 30% of cable subscribers saying they’d cut the cord entirely if they could stream their favorite teams online.

Read on to learn first-hand how sports teams and media companies are building and sustaining revenue with live streaming and OTT content.

How to build and monetize your sports video app

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Perhaps no fan is more passionate than a local high school sports fan. After all, it’s hard not to be invested in a team when the starting point guard or shortstop is your niece or neighbor. But for local sports enthusiasts, not going to the game has historically meant missing the game altogether — small-town high school sports isn’t exactly common programming on ESPN or Fox Sports 1.

Local sports media finds a niche market in OTT

Local sports media finds a niche market in OTT

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Indiana sports production company ISC Sports Network sought to address this problem when it was founded a decade ago, but it was not a simple endeavor. With ISC staff representing a conglomeration of in-state telecom companies, their team saw the early signs of the cord-cutting trend begin to take shape, and sought to pivot towards emerging content distribution methods.

To power this shift, ISC Sports uses Vimeo to offer live and video-on-demand (VOD) streaming services. Thanks to the quality, reliability, and ease of using Vimeo’s platforms, ISC never has to worry about the online streaming side of its service; it can simply focus on delivering a quality broadcast to their community of sports fans. Which is a critical factor of ISC’s success, considering 70% of viewers who stream live sports actually expect a bad experience, according to a report from StreamingMedia. (Yikes!)

“Anyone who’s ever been in video production on the local sports side knows that there’s a lot to do, a lot to worry about,” says Greg Maish, President of ISC Sports. Because Vimeo offers low latency live streaming and reliable on-demand video services, ISC Sports is able to focus on creating great productions, without worrying about technical mishaps or poor streaming quality based on their location.Maish and his team continue to defy expectations for their viewers. Covering sports in

Local sports media finds a niche market in OTT

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small, rural markets, they offer a top-of-the-line product that serves a dedicated audience that grows with each season. Its success speaks to the arrival of live streaming and over-the-top (OTT) media services as mainstream content delivery systems — and more specifically, to the unique offerings of Vimeo as the premier solution for both.As a result, ISC Sports is growing and thriving in today’s digital media landscape.

They add new sports and leagues to their live video streaming schedules every year, and are expanding their production teams to broadcast even more games. They also host extensive, years-old archives of past games so that fans can catch up on last night’s matchups or the glory days from years ago. They’re even working towards building a subscription model to monetize those archives, which will grow their revenue substantially.

Successfully growing their business with Vimeo over time has only deepened their trust, too. “We had a very good experience from the outset with Vimeo, and over time that comfort level has benefited us tremendously,” Maish said. “There’s a trust level that’s built up over time, and it’s been a very successful partnership.”

Local sports media finds a niche market in OTT

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Sports organizations of all sizes are entering the OTT or live streaming space, and when a sports media company chooses to do so by building out its own digital platform, it’s especially daunting. Developing content delivery systems and a functioning website for streaming video or VOD services is complicated, time-consuming, and expensive. Even the cost of just building an app that will work across multiple platforms can easily run into the six figures.

Lowering the barrier to enter the OTT industry

Lowering the barrier to enter the OTT industry

7Lowering the barrier to enter the OTT industry

Take the Jacksonville Jaguars, who began live streaming in 2015 to deliver in-house coverage of the team to casual and die-hard fans alike. With a broadcast staff of six people, they didn’t have the internal resources to build the technological infrastructure for their content. But by working with Vimeo, they were able to deliver a top-of-the-line streaming product from the second the cameras started rolling. Coverage of events like the draft combine and training camp came to life without a hitch.

“The premium service has paid for itself,” says Jaguars Director of Broadcasting, Patrick Kavanagh. “Everything we’ve asked about trying — simulcasting, putting on animated lower thirds, creating a graphics box — they’ve been able to help us with.”

“We’re not engineers, we’re producers. We don’t have a TV station behind us, so having that support was vital,” Kavanagh says.

With Vimeo, you don’t need to hire teams of engineers, designers, and web developers — we’ve already done the work for you. Instead, you can focus on creating quality content and managing your own channel through our easy-to-use platform, mobile and TV apps, and CMS. Creating your first channel takes a matter of hours, with a minimal upfront investment.

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You’ve likely heard news about the demise of cable and the rise of streaming video. The total number of cord-cutters — people who have cancelled a cable, digital, or satellite TV subscription without re-subscribing — is expected to reach 33 million by the end of 2018. Meanwhile, 61% of people in the 18-to-29 age range say that online streaming is their primary method of consuming television. That number figures to only grow from here.

So where do sports fit in? Well, just about everywhere — seemingly every major digital streaming service is positioning to make sports a foundational element of its content

A new streaming landscape for sports

A new streaming landscape for sports

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strategy. Hulu recently began to offer live streaming across all major sports, and Amazon Prime Video signed a deal to broadcast the NFL’s Thursday Night Football matchups. Across 10 Thursday Night Football broadcasts in 2017, Amazon attracted an average of 1.7 million viewers per game. Legacy cable networks have broadened their focus on streaming, with ESPN notably launching the ESPN+ subscription service to offer expanded and niche sports programming. Even social media networks are getting in on the action: Twitter and Facebook have both inked deals with major professional sports leagues to air live games.

It’s no wonder why sports have become a particular point of focus for streaming services: it’s content that viewers actively seek out. According to a study conducted by the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg:

A new streaming landscape for sports

are interested in paying for an all-sports OTT channel

of fans live far from their favorite team’s home city meaning that online streaming is almost always the easiest and best way to see their team play

of women self-identify as sports fans, and women are willing to pay up to 50% more than men for OTT sports media

households with childrenwould pay more for online streaming over cable or satellite packages

6364

8070

%%

%%

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In the past, inexact tools like Nielsen ratings meant content producers hardly knew how many people were really watching their programming. Now, with the analytics tools offered by Vimeo’s digital video platforms, you not only have access to the exact number of people viewing your content — you also have answers to the who, where, and when of your audience.

Analytics that drive growth

Analytics that drive growth

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For sports organizations looking to grow the audience for their digital video content, this means interpreting data to establish what content resonates with viewers, and why.

“You have to think about the content that rewards them for coming to you,” says Mark Leblang, Studio/Live Production Manager for the Philadelphia Eagles, who use Vimeo to give their fans inside access to draft day, postgame press conferences, and more.

Analytics that drive growth

I think understanding devices and average viewing time is useful, but generally speaking we’re looking to use those analytics to help us develop content types that help Eagles fans feel gratified for coming to us.

Mark LeblangStudio/Live Production Manager for the Philadelphia Eagles

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Citing steady growth in digital audience size since the Eagles began using Vimeo, Leblang says he and his team have been successful in identifying what content drives audience viewership. The numbers back it up: During their draft weekend 2016 coverage, the Eagles drew 112,000 viewers for an average viewing time of over 13 minutes.

Sometimes, analytics yield unexpected surprises. ISC Sports provides coverage of an annual international youth baseball tournament that is hosted locally in Indiana, an event that draws global viewership to their streams. But what Maish didn’t anticipate was retaining this overseas audience — for high school sports.“It’s such a cool dynamic, and we’d have no idea [about this global audience]

without these analytics.” Maish says.

ISC Sports’ global community doesn’t disappear after the final shot, though. Mexican and Puerto Rican baseball fans are so taken with ISC Sports’ coverage that they’ll tune back in months later to re-watch a less familiar sport, like basketball, in a region to which they had no pre-existing connection. “It’s such a cool dynamic, to know that we’ve got an international audience that watches Indiana sports.” It’s a testament to the power of a quality sports streaming product.

Analytics that drive growth

What blows my mind is that we’ll be in the middle of basketball season, and we’ll find people from all over the world still watching our broadcasts.

Greg MaishPresident of ISC Sports

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Offering a live streaming service, an OTT service, or both provide myriad revenue generation opportunities for sports organizations and businesses. As an end-to-end customer, ISC Sports uses Vimeo to offer sports content to its viewers across all channels. The broadcast network is in the process of developing a subscription model for its archival content — while keeping its live content free — after having seen how popular the consumption of archived games is among fans.

Developing new revenue streams with streaming video

Developing new revenue streams with streaming video

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Maish also notes that analytics suggest parents and student-athletes like to return home from games and watch them over again on the archived broadcast — further suggesting success for the company’s forthcoming subscription model.

Offering a subscription video service, though, is only one way of generating revenue through a sports OTT service. According to Kavanagh, the Jacksonville Jaguars are committed to producing 20 hours of live original content with Vimeo during the season, much of which is filmed in the same television/radio studio.

“The key thing was educating our sales team on where these opportunities existed,” says Kavanagh. “Here’s this studio we invested in, with monitors that could easily have logos on them, with sold spots like any other radio show.”

In April 2018, Kavanagh’s team broadcast a “State of the Franchise” event, a deep-dive on the organization’s finances, ticket sales, and more. Needless to say, it’s not for the casual Jacksonville fan. Knowing that primarily diehards are watching, they cull the viewership data for this specific event in search of sales leads for season tickets and other opportunities.

It goes to show that, with the right video tools and customer insights, you never know what opportunities will present themselves to further engage and expand your core audience.

Developing new revenue streams with streaming video

We have such substantial archives, and we’re astonished by the analytics that tell us people still go back years to watch old games.

Greg MaishPresident of ISC Sports

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In order to bring in (and maintain) viewership, of course, sports broadcasters must provide a flawless viewing experience. Consumers today expect top-notch video quality, period. If viewers are experiencing poor picture quality — or worse, buffering — they’ll shut off their stream entirely and do something else. And while building the technological foundation for crystal-clear streaming video is a massive undertaking, with Vimeo, the foundation has already been laid.

Creating the best viewing experience

Creating the best viewing experience

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In order to deliver fast and clear picture quality, Vimeo take advantage of three separate, high-quality content delivery networks, or CDNs. Having three operating CDNs means that viewers streaming videos on any Vimeo-based platform will receive a clear feed, regardless of where they are in the world, or how many people are watching the same stream.

For Greg Maish and the team at ISC Sports, offering clear video to their viewers was far from a given, especially in the more rural parts of Indiana. But Vimeo’s technology turned quality into a certainty.

Equally as important is making sure that viewers have a premier viewing experience seamlessly across devices. After all, over 50% of subscribers Vimeo’s streaming solutions consume content on a TV or mobile app. Vimeo OTT customers can easily build and customize branded apps under their brand, in which viewers’ experiences are guaranteed to be first-rate. Each video uploaded to Vimeo is automatically remade into 10 distinct files, each designed for a different viewing platform. This ensures that consumers get clarity and proper formatting whether on a smart TV, mobile device or tablet — or anything else.

Creating the best viewing experience

Some of the places we go, you might not have a great connection if you’re not on WiFi. But with Vimeo we’ve been able to establish trust. In all the years we’ve been together, we’ve never had a complaint about Vimeo — it’s always just worked.

Greg MaishPresident of ISC Sports

17Creating the best viewing experience

We analyzed 1.3 billion consumer data points on the Vimeo OTT platform to uncover techniques to grow audiences and prevent app subscription churn. Download our ebook to learn audience growth trends and where viewers are watching OTT streaming video.

Vimeo’s commitment to putting forth a cost-effective product that ensures quality broadcasts and empowers customers to grow their audiences makes it the leading digital video platform for sports organizations of all sizes, from regional coverage all the way up to the pros.

Vimeo provides an all-in-one OTT technology solution—from white-label apps to flexible monetization tools— for individuals and businesses to create branded video subscription services across all major platforms and connected devices. Vimeo currently powers over one thousand partner subscription services with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.