NEW YORK — The origin story for Bleacher Report Live — Turner Sports’ soon-to-launch OTT platform offering a personalized live sports hub — dates to finding a solution for a very real Saturday afternoon need.
A group of friends a few years ago were out at a lakehouse scouring the dial for an SMU football game. Cable box channel-surfing, googling, satellite radio station-flipping and iPad app searching all failed to locate the broadcast.
One of the people there was Lenny Daniels, president of Turner Sports, who commissioned one of his product managers, Matt McElroy, to develop an app that would centralize all the listings. That work became Catch Sports, which provides the TV, radio and streaming app information for every game, as well as manages a directory of sports bars carrying the necessary channel.
From there, the Turner team considered a major enhancement: using the app to host the games themselves. The network could only directly stream the leagues for which it has broadcast rights, of course — NBA League Pass, UEFA Champions League, NCAA March Madness, the PGA Championship, National Lacrosse League and more — but it could also provide links to competitors where the game could be found. That became B/R Live.
“We said, why wouldn’t we offer the video in between?” Daniels told SportTechie. “We’re never going to own it all. Nobody’s going to own all sports video, that’s crazy, but iTunes doesn’t own all content. They give you a great place to buy it and a great place to listen to it, and everybody else goes on their platform. That’s really the idea behind this.”
The OTT service first announced last summer will launch on April 7 with the new football Spring League, which kicks off with the spectacle of Johnny Manziel’s return to the sport. The app will be free to start, but Turner will impose a paywall at some point, although it plans to allow a five-minute free preview for each game. The NBA’s short-duration microtransactions allowing fans to tune in for even just a few minutes of a game at a reduced price will also be available, an innovative new way to access content announced during an appearance by commissioner Adam Silver himself.
Turner plans to license excitement data (algorithmic measures of a game’s excitement level) along with user preference data to curate the feed for users to be immediately presented with the games likely to interest them. Video will autoplay for swift access. So-called “shoulder content” — such as pre- and post-game studio shows — is expected around the time the new Champions League season begins in June.
“In today’s market, with rules around exclusivity where live sports are found, along with the proliferation of OTT products, it’s really hard just to find your favorite team and watch them,” B/R Live general manager Hania Poole said, describing the interface as “clean, intuitive and puts live sports at the center.”
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
Turner hosted the event at Bleacher Report’s Midtown Manhattan office that has all the trappings and amenities you’d expect from a site largely run by and targeting the millennial and Gen Z demographics. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Dave Finocchio, said B/R had a monthly reach of 250 million with 75 percent of that audience under the age of 35.
That’s the clear reason Turner is hitching this new product to the B/R brand that it acquired six years ago and that Daniels was tabbed a “disruptor” in sports media.
“We envisioned a time that the brand can become a virtual network on its own right, and that time is now,” Turner president David Levy said. “Digital-first offerings like BR Live enable us to target new fans and deliver content that’s untethered to our television networks.”