Great sports making great video content
The best sports are full of drama, thrills and emotion that connect us with events when watched live or through the lens of social media. In fact, social media often gets us closer to the moments that really matter, helping us to see and feel the drama as it unfolds.
Check out the following thrilling and emotive videos from these socially-innovative sports organizations.
Guinness PRO14 Rugby
The Guinness PRO14 rugby tournament is a global brand with a TV rights deal and an innovative digital team making the most of social videos, too. Our Tellyo Pro platform is being utilised to create compelling highlights from live games and clip moments to provide videos of crucial events for social audiences, all in a matter of seconds.
Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI)
The UCI is responsible for numerous cycling events around the world, with one of the most prestigious being the UCI World Road Championships.
2018’s UCI World Road Championship was held in Innsbruck, Austria. The event, involved the best riders in the world, while some routes had approximately 5,000 metres of altitude, making it truly challenging. The Championships were broadcasted to 150 countries, with short video clips also shared to social media.
Just look at this incredible finish:
It’s @alejanvalverde ??!
Alejandro is our 2018 UCI Road World Champion ?
WHAT A FINISH!#InnsbruckTirol2018 pic.twitter.com/35RgxBH5tI— UCI (@UCI_cycling) 30 września 2018
Or this heart-warming example of fair play:
Padun ?? “Got something to eat mate?”
Muller ?? “Sure, here you go”
LOVING THIS ❤#InnsbruckTirol2018 pic.twitter.com/fPLmx0ZueK— UCI (@UCI_cycling) 28 września 2018
International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF)
Each month the ITTF produce hours of stunning video content, taken during competitions around the world. From the Republic of Fiji to Germany, during duel after duel, hours of content is recorded and shared via streams and social videos. Fortunately, it’s easy to produce and manage this amount of content with Tellyo.
Table tennis is such an amazing sport for video. It’s extremely dynamic and spectacular – every single millimetre counts here! When the best players in the world are playing, you can be sure that you’ll witness all kinds of emotion.
Fise
Every year Fise organise multiple events across different extreme sports – from parkour to BMX and skateboarding, with the FISE World Series at its pinnacle. The event is one of the most prestigious extreme sports events, hosting the best athletes and gathering thousands of spectators at venues, but also digitally and on social media.
The FISE production crew utilize Tellyo Pro Editor to produce short clips out of live streams ingested onto the platform.
England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB)
Global sports production company, Sunset+Vine, provide engaging video clips directly from live streamed ECB cricket games. The goal being to promote cricket more widely across social media, and to let fans around the world see the ECB’s best moments.
Is your sports organisation ready for video?
Every single sport is suited to being promoted through video content. Sport fans simply want to watch sports, wherever they are!
If you want to learn more about video’s impact on sports bodies and federations, explore our blog and case studies section, or simply contact us to discuss how you could benefit from utilizing our Tellyo platform.
Most of the videos mentioned in this article have been made using Tellyo Pro – our cloud-based platform for frequent and regular live content production. It enables you to ingest video streams and broadcast these to social channels and RTMP destinations, while also clipping live content into videos to post on social media.
If you’re looking to clip videos for social media, there are some new Tellyo automation features to consider, especially if you’re using Opta event metadata:
- Smart Clips, which automates video clip creation from live sports content.
- Auto Clip-to-Post that lets you fully-automate clip creation through to social messaging and social posting, all in one go.
Both are giving more power to editors in their mission to deliver quality sports content to audiences quickly and efficiently.
ITTF – from strength to strength with online video strategy
The International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) is the governing body for 226 worldwide associations and oversees more than 120 international events. It is one of the largest sports federations in the world and has a proud history, having organised the World Table Tennis Championships since 1926.
Our partnership with the ITTF started back in 2017 and has since gone from strength to strength. Today, Tellyo is integral to the ITTF’s direct-to-fan video strategy, enabling the federation to stream matches and share clips
from tournaments previously difficult to access for fans across the globe.
Increased global streaming collaborations
Starting with one trial tournament in 2017, Tellyo now supports all of the ITTF’s major tours and championships. More recently, our platform has been used during regional events in remote locations within Fiji, Nigeria and India.
When working in remote locations, the ITTF rely on us to seamlessly deliver streamed content to global fans online. The key to our success is two-fold. Firstly, our platform’s infrastructure is capable of receiving signals from anywhere in the world, however remote, thanks to the network of servers we use. Secondly, we provide an extensive set of advanced tools to ITTF production teams, expertly meeting their various technical requirements.
Video clips further boosting engagement with the ITTF
With a greater number of tournaments being covered, the ITTF is seizing these opportunities to create more video clips for its social media channels. In turn, these clips help to drive viewers to its live stream and are having a hugely positive impact on overall engagement with the federation and table tennis online.
“I cannot imagine life without Tellyo. The platform is at the core of our social video strategy, helping us to showcase dynamic sports content from multiple ITTF tournaments online. All-in-all, thanks to Tellyo, we’re better able to entertain and excite our fans, dramatically improving our digital reach, video views and fan engagement levels across social media.”
What makes real-time sports videos engaging?
It’s a good question to pose: what does make a real-time sports video engaging? Having worked with the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) for a year now, we feel we’ve developed a deeper understanding from what they’ve created and shared through our platform.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of the ITTF’s best moments of 2017 – a year that was truly amazing for the organisation, the players and the sport itself. Here at Tellyo, we’re extremely proud to work with the ITTF – the largest international sports federation in the world – to help them distribute such amazing events and historical moments across social media and to thousands of table tennis fans.
Here are their best, most epic video moments of 2017.
Did it hit?
Full of emotion and utterly unpredictable, sport has it all at times. Millimetres can separate players, with even the best referees sometimes struggling to make a call. Here’s what happened during the women’s finals of the ITTF World Cup.
Was the referee’s verdict right? Did the ball hit the table, or miss by millimetres? Watching the above video, we could argue all night long without any satisfactory conclusion; while the video’s comments section is also proof that fans love to watch this kind of content, to debate decisions and make their own call.
The Did it hit? video reached more than 6 million people, gained 1.3 million views and achieved more than 200 shares! And, just for the record, it was Zhu Yuling who won this amazing game!
The turning point
Every tournament features great personalities and the narrative of an underdog fighting their way to victory. Table tennis is no different. At the 2017 World Table Tennis Championships, the audience was treated to one of the most amazing games in the history of table tennis, ever.
Lin Gaoyuan had a five match points lead against Xu Xin, the world number three. More often than not, the winner would be obvious. But not this time, as Xu Xin kept pressing and won the game point by point, proving that table tennis is one of the most amazing and thrilling sports to watch.
Published on the ITTF’s Facebook page, it was table tennis’s equivalent of the 2005 Champions League Final between Liverpool and Milan. It reached more than 17 million, and achieved 1.7million views and 55,000 engagements, including over 7,000 shares!
Teenagers for the win
Born in 2003, Tomokazu Harimoto is table tennis’s teenage prodigy. Back in August 2017 he won the men’s singles title during ITTF World Tour in the Czech Republic. Aged 14, he became the youngest player ever to win the title, or any similar title, beating much older and more experienced players – something that doesn’t happen very often in professional sports.
Here’s one of the most popular ITTF videos from 2017: Harimoto winning against former Olympic bronze medallist, Jun Mizutani, who was two-times older than Harimoto at the time.
The video of Harimoto’s win reached 1.5 million and achieved almost 300,000 views on Facebook and Twitter.
What have we learned from these epic moments?
Online engagement is triggered by moments that represent the very essence of sport:
- The high emotion of being a sports fan
- Unusual turn of events or controversial decisions that sway matches
- The narrative of underdogs and youngsters defeating those considered to be masters
- Heroes like 14-year-old Harimoto who are quickly taken to people’s hearts
The ITTF videos shared above certainly resonated in some way with audiences – be it through emotion, or the narrative of an underdog or hero – and engagement levels rocketed as a result.
To experience even more epic moments, stay tuned for the upcoming 2018 ITTF Team World Cup being hosted in London.
What’s in store for social video in 2018
With 2018 well underway, I took the time to ask a few of my colleagues and Tellyo customers what they feel is in store for social video this year.
Here are their thoughts and predictions:
“2018 will see a direct-to-audience offering become the norm, in which social is fully accepted as a mainstream video channel to reach and engage audiences. For top-tier sports or major broadcasters, such an offering will complement and extend the reach of existing content, engaging younger demographics effectively and providing further touch points for fans and viewers. In the case of niche sports, this will be the year to choose a direct offering as a primary channel, with a comprehensive content schedule around all events and key moments.
There’s no doubt that technology has changed what is possible, even if you have more limited resources. What we’ll see across the board is better video production and content, more experimentation and innovation, and a richer experience for audiences when content is shared directly with them. Those organisations that succeed will achieve constant exposure and greater engagement, with this having a positive effect on revenue.”
“To succeed online in 2018, it will be important for sports clubs, leagues and federations to continually evolve with the social video production technology they use and the platforms they choose to partner with.
For federations like ours, the year ahead is further opportunity to ‘do it yourself’ – to push forward with the production and distribution tools that provide us with the autonomy to create highly engaging content. It’s this content that positively impacts how fans experience our tournaments and brand globally, be it via a live stream or a social media video clip.”
“2018 will be the year in which broadcasters and producers push for more from the technology available to them. This is being driven by viewers’ expectations of the technology and their desire to experience truly high-quality digital streams.
While live streaming will only grow in popularity, 2018 will also see it evolve. With all the major platforms now offering users the chance to live stream, producers and broadcasters will adapt in the coming year to prevent audiences from tuning out as the ‘live’ novelty wears off. We’ll see a more holistic approach to social broadcasts take shape, with social media, video clips and multi-device considerations increasingly playing a role.”
“While more and more people consume video content through social media and smartphones, this is both an opportunity for marketers but also a challenge to grapple with in 2018. Over the coming year, this challenge will need to be taken head on, particularly as engagement with video will increase in tandem with consumption.
As a result, there will be a spike in demand for solutions that can deliver video content to different platforms simultaneously. Marketers will want confidence in the way they can manage multiple video formats across platforms, eyeing the frictionless engagement that this will bring. Essentially 2018 will be the year in which marketers get complete control of how video is presented for mobiles and social media platforms with suitable APIs.”
“2018 will see us make much more of social media-friendly short clips of our skaters, mountain bikers, BMXers and wakeboarders. This sort of content sits well with the ephemeral content that our younger audience loves nowadays – such as the short-lived social video clips that you see on social media platforms.
During our 2018 World Series, we’ll also continue to mix clips with live streams. This way we can recreate the live experience of our events online, amplifying the excitement and buzz at each event, and so reaching and engaging with more people across social media.”
Have we missed anything? Feel free to tweet your thoughts and predictions to us @TellyoTV
