Twitter continued its blaze of sports video partnerships, announcing a digital media rights partnership with Campus Insiders that will include live streaming of more than 300 college sports events. The deal follows other recent partnerships for Twitter that includes the Pac-12 and the NBA (along with Thursday Night Football). The new agreement will see Twitter carry Campus Insiders’ live college games with line-up of football, basketball, lacrosse, soccer, baseball, volleyball, field hockey, water polo and swimming.
Cynopsis Sports asked Dana Golden, EVP of Business Development at Silver Chalice, about the growth of Campus Insiders, its new deal and the future of the ACC Digital Network following the league’s new deal with ESPN.
Golden on the 2015 season: There are a few key takeaways I can share. Mobile audience growth continues to explode at a rapid pace. Just looking at our Campus Insiders audience for the first half of 2016 compared to 2015, mobile traffic made up 32% of total audience in 2015 compared to 75% in 2016. Then, if you break down where the mobile audience is coming from, over 60% in 2016 is coming from social media. While our audience continues to grow year over year, we are paying closer attention to the audience source and device used to make sure our content is available on the right platforms and optimized for the best experience.
On the year ahead: Our goal continues to be serving our Conference partners and their fans. With that, we want and need to experiment with new digital platforms, while balancing our business needs as well. Last year, we launched a “Live Game of the Day” series on Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire and Xbox and saw great initial success. I suspect we will continue to dive deeper into those types of streaming media devices in a lean back experience. We are also actively working on new partnerships in OTT subscription services. The distribution partners we are speaking with are very interested in our live and VOD content portfolio and the flexibility we offer as a digital service.
On the Twitter partnership: We have had a terrific partnership with Twitter that dates back several years and we work together with their sales team as an Amplify partner. Our social media team uses Twitter faithfully every day to converse with college sports fans. With the partnership already in place and news of Twitter’s NFL deal and interest in streaming sports, the conversation naturally developed into how we could further work together. Given our portfolio of over 3,000 live games and the wide range of sports we deliver, it was just a matter of framing up the business parameters.
On the impact on the ACC Digital Network following the ESPN deal: No impact at all. Silver Chalice and Raycom Sports will continue to partner to deliver the ACC Digital Network to fans of all the ACC schools, teams and athletes across the country on the most popular and strategic digital platforms. This coming school year, the ACC Digital Network will once again serve up over 2,000 news, highlights and original videos that tell the stories about the great teams of the ACC.
