VAIL, COLORADO – At the Burton US Open Snowboarding Championships, Red Bull TV is diversifying its content to fit the needs of an audience accustomed to multiple viewing options. For the traditionalists, there’s the standard broadcast on FOX Sports 2. For cord-cutters angling for the feel of a standard broadcast, Red Bull TV streams the action on Burton’s website and on its own channel. And for streamers who want more engagement, the company airs its content on Facebook Watch, where viewers can provide commentary in real time. The diversification forces Red Bull’s production team to stay in the present while simultaneously looking towards the future.
“When you have all these distribution points, you have to make sure they are all produced at a certain level,” explained Charlie Rosene, Vice President of Production for Red Bull Media House North America. “It all comes down to communication and organization. We have to be in the moment but also two steps ahead.”
This is the first time Red Bull has used a different host specifically for Facebook Watch. Delivering content on that platform is different from a traditional broadcast for multiple reasons: To start, many viewers see the content without sound so the shots are visually heavy. And the live comments feature allows for added engagement and real-time question-and-answer sessions with Facebook viewers.
“On Facebook Watch, you have to cater specifically to that platform,” said Claude Merkel, the Executive Producer of Sports and Events for Red Bull Media House North America. “That means lots of graphics, posting trivia questions for commenters to answer and asking questions to the athletes that were posted in the comment section.”
The person tasked with going through the comment section to find good questions isn’t in Vail; she’s in Santa Monica at Red Bull’s North America Headquarters. The broadcast is sent to her with cloud-based encoding and she adds graphics and interacts with the viewers in real time.
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Red Bull TV doesn’t describe its broadcasts as “traditional” but it nevertheless hopes to produce the quality viewers have come to expect from the mainstream media channels.
“For the Red Bull TV broadcast, the goal is not a live stream but a broadcast quality experience,” Rosene said. “From both a quality level and a story level. We are doing the same formats NBC or FOX would be doing but we want to push it even further. If they broadcast in 720, we want to do 1080.”
SportTechie Takeaway:
Diversifying distribution methods for live sports isn’t new as leagues recognize that they want fan eyeballs where ever they can get them, from traditional broadcasts to Twitter, Amazon, and Facebook Watch. Red Bull TV’s move here follows a string of moves by sports content owners to make games simultaneously available on TV via cable/satellite and streaming on mobile. The move with Facebook Watch is interesting, in that Red Bull TV already offers its content in streaming format via its own service, but it may make sense for a niche sport like snowboarding, one with a particularly young, stream-happy audience. Contrast Red Bull TV’s decision to put its content everywhere and at all times with MLB’s recent move to air 25 games this season exclusively on Facebook Watch — those 25 games will not also be broadcast on network TV or streamed online outside of Facebook.