Fancred’s fan-focused platform continues to evolve, with the goal to ultimately become the most comprehensive home for sports fans. Pushing forward through team partnerships, like the Carolina Panthers, is one part to demonstrate marked growth. The collective mobile experience comprises an array of facets, particularly to grasp fans’ engagement interests.
Clearly, the live video streaming space remains anomalous, especially when it comes to optimizing mobile, user-generated content. Periscope, earlier this year, proclaimed that it boasts 10 million users consuming the equivalent of 40 years’ worth of video each day. Its nearest competitor in Meerkat, meanwhile, hasn’t publicized their user numbers. Livestreaming is very much in its infancy, still representing a small fraction of total web video consumption.
If content creators haven’t completely figured out what constitutes worthwhile content, neither have consumers in deeming what is so–much less determining a viable monetization model.
Sports, of course, represents an avenue in which livestreaming can gain traction and commercialized. Leagues and teams have started experimenting with mobile live video streaming, through behind-the-scenes access and special footage, where digital rights are not an issue. There’s arguably as much successful cases as those that are not–that’s not say that livestreaming’s future won’t prosper over the next few years.
Today, though, Fancred launches their latest feature: live video streaming.
“We’ve always known that we’d need to offer some format of video,” Hossein Kash Razzaghi, Fancred’s Chief Executive Officer, tells SportTechie.
“It’s a natural tendency for sports fans to either want to watch great sports footage or capture their own experiences with video. We had many debates over whether to start with VOD or live. We, ultimately, decided on live, because we feel seeing things happen in the moment is a really powerful experience. We also don’t know of any other sports app that offers livestreaming for fans,” continued Razzaghi.
Fortunately and ironically for Fancred, most of their team spent close to a decade at video-based startup locally in Boston beforehand, which extensively helped to build out this feature. They have experience in developing and designing infrastructure that has delivered video to millions of people. It took a couple of months for them to construct this product internally.
From a UX and UI standpoint, Fancred wanted to include lievstreaming as part of a larger platform. They want the experience to be as simple as possible and easy to use. Fans need to be able to quickly stream or watch streams without much effort. Fancred made a conscious decision to not include commenting as part of this feature. Razzaghi believes comments have the ability to turn nasty and into spam instantly. Instead of comments, users should be able to just watch people’s streams and be able to lightly interact in form of up or down votes.
Razzaghi insists that Fancred isn’t a livestreaming app: “We are a sports app that includes lievstreaming. I think that’s an important distinction, and don’t consider livestreaming apps our competition. We, obviously, want our livetsreaming content to be super compelling for fans; but, with this release, our platform has evolved to offer live scores in addition to a robust social platform to interact with other fans.”
Some potential use cases, though, include: fan reactions, opinions, thoughts, and rants. They expect users to actually create their own 5-minute “TV shows,” with the full belief that the next wave of sports personalities can be derived from its medium. Also, the “moments” fan experience before, during, and after attending live sporting events will surely transpire.
It’s important to note that there’s a 5-minute cap to what creators can produce for these live streams; and archiving isn’t available yet. They can also switch camera view and select other users to notify them about their lievstreaming as well as sharing via Twitter and Facebook. By viewers being able to up-vote (fire) and down-vote (snoozing) streams, a real-time polling system, in effect, is formed within this feature. Creators can include a link at the end of the video in order to drive traffic back to external properties.
“I believe time constraint gives clarity and direction to your content,” says Razzaghi, in terms of there being a limit to the streams’ length.
“Viewers want to know the level of (time) commitment they need to give the content before they immerse themselves in it,” Razzaghi added.
Fancred might extend the 5-minute cap in the future, but they think that time frame works as a good enough starting point, both for creators and consumers.
On top of strategically not including commenting, they also decided against showing how many other users are on a stream you may be watching. The point behind not offering this element “is simply to eliminate noise and external factors that could influence your experience with the live content,” states Razzaghi.
Fancred’s foray into livestreaming positions them to be able to adapt to new mobile consumptions trends as they mature. They’re looking forward to seeing how their users adopt this new feature. Many of their partners have scheduled live streams during the first couple after this launch. With live scores also debuting, Fancred’s plan towards more personalizations and commerce are in the horizon, too.