MID-ROLL ADS IN LIVE BROADCASTS
Sports Communications is the company that operates the internet sports media “SPORTS BULL” (abbreviated to “Spobu”). It has partnerships with over 60 media outlets and covers over 40 sports. It is not just sports with a wide fan base, such as baseball and soccer, but it also picks up detailed information on sports that may be minor now but want to expand their fan base, and the number of users is increasing rapidly. The number of viewers and visitors increases dramatically during events, and the number of daily active users (DAU) for the 2018 summer high school baseball tournament exceeded 3 million. Like high school baseball, the summer’s major content is the Inter-High School Athletic Meet. Yusuke Kumagai, a director at the company, says, “Amateur sports have a very wide target audience. It is deeply rooted in the local community, and can be enjoyed by people of all ages, from the current generation to the parents and grandparents of that generation. In fact, only about half of the people at our company have the habit of watching professional sports. Even so, everyone is drawn to amateur sports. There is a mysterious charm to them, and it may be the original experience of many Japanese people who have had club activities in their school days. For the company, which is working to distribute information on all kinds of sports, and for the fans of Spobu, this tournament to decide the best high school team in Japan is a major event.
The desire to broadcast the Inter-High live led the company to decide to adopt a video platform. Since its founding, the company has been distributing several video contents, and the response from viewers has been good. However, the burden on the content managers was heavy, and it was difficult for a startup company with a small number of staff to fully engage in video. When it comes to live broadcasting, the burden increases even more, and it is necessary to have a full-time staff member. As a system that can solve such issues, Brightcove Video Cloud was the best fit.
Mr. Taiki Kumagai, Manager of the Development Department, recalls, “Brightcove Video Cloud was the only solution that could be used to stably operate live streaming with pre-roll and mid-roll advertisements. The fact that IT knowledge was not required for the operation was also attractive, and we were confident that we could achieve live streaming for Inter-High.tv and BIG6.tv (Tokyo Big 6 Baseball League) with our current system.
700 LIVE BROADCASTS WERE ACHIEVED DURING THE INTER-HIGH PERIOD
We will soon enter the 5G era. The need for video will only continue to grow. I feel that preparing the platform and streamlining the delivery process in advance was a great benefit for our business.
Yusuke Kumagai
Director, Undo Tsushinsha Co.
The distribution was on a large scale. Over 100 videos were delivered to viewers per day. Live broadcasts were also run simultaneously for multiple sports, with 700 matches broadcast live during the period. In the end, around 12,000 videos of various lengths were edited and published as video content.
“Now that we can complete all our work on the video platform, we feel that the total man-hours required have been reduced by about 30%. I can say with certainty that we would not have been able to achieve this scale of distribution without Brightcove Video Cloud” (Taiki Kumagai).
CONTENT THAT CAN BE ENJOYED BY ‘PASSIONATE USERS’
It is said that amateur sports have many “heavy users”. They stay for long periods of time and watch the videos in detail. There are also many users who visit the site repeatedly. The number of impressions may not be as high as for major sports, but there are definitely users who have a passion for the sport. The company is trying to deliver content that will make these users enjoy the site even more.
Yusuke Kumagai says, “Our aim is to become a presence that ‘watches’, ‘plays’, and ‘supports’ sports. At the moment, we are focusing on ‘watching’ using videos, but we are also trying to support the creation of experiences through ‘playing’.”
In the future, we want to become a presence that supports. Our goal is to be more directly involved in supporting the transmission of better information and consulting on monetization methods, while cultivating and developing the audience that is interested in our content. In doing so, they may be able to convey the appeal of excellent video content and the advertising revenue it generates to all kinds of sports organizations.
“We are about to enter the 5G era. As communication speeds increase and it becomes possible to exchange large amounts of data at high speeds, the demand for video will only continue to grow. I feel that preparing the platform and streamlining the distribution process in advance has been a great benefit to our business,” he says.
