After years of setting records with its streaming coverage of the Olympic Games and the NFL, last week’s news that NBC Sports Digital would be taking on the likes of MLBAM with its new Playmaker Media service marked the latest evolutionary step for the company and comes as NBC Sports Digital prepares for the production goliath of the Rio Olympics. The new service will see the company launch live streaming and VOD solutions for clients, leveraging its 10-plus years of live streaming that includes more than 10,000 events this year. Its first client, naturally, will be the IOC, with Playmaker to provide live streaming video support for the IOC’s Olympic Channel.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with Rick Cordella, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Digital Media, NBC Sports Group about the launch, the Olympics and how sports are driving technological change.
Cordella on launching Playmaker Media: We’ve streamed for a long while. We started streaming back in 2008 and we were the first ones to start streaming the NFL. Now, we have the technology, the team, the know-how, and expertise to really stream live events at scale. As we do, we look around for other business opportunities and more and more of our league partners are taking rights that they have either retained or are creating and we are seeing broadcasters put out more and more content out on the Internet. People are more comfortable than ever streaming content with the proliferation of devices. We felt it was the right time to extend ourselves since we’ve got a great product, and there are probably others who could use this technology, particularly our partners.
On sports driving change: I think what’s happened is because of the difference between VOD and live. Live is really trying to, as I like to say, bake the pie and get it out there at the same time, instead of baking the pie two days earlier and bringing it out at the time of your choosing. It’s hard. We’ve been through it with the Olympics and the Super Bowl to stream at that scale with monetization. The Internet is not really made for this.
On clients: We are now partnering with the IOC, which has been one of our closest partners and we’re helping them launch the IOC’s international Olympic channel which launches later this year. When we sign up a big project like that, we will staff up, but the people who are working on it, most of the time, are already based here.
On NBC’s digital plans at the Olympics: We will be streaming every event live, with about 4500 hours of content. So there will be 40+ concurrent feeds at any one time. It is enormous and stretches us. But it make it better for everything else that we do. It is hair-raising at time during the Olympics but we are a better technological company for it. We have a great staff here and we have a pretty good baseline of digital employees here to begin with. But for Rio, we will be growing to about 300-350 digital employees.
Hear more from Rick Cordella at the Cynopsis Sports Business Summit on June 22. Tomorrow is the last day for early registration discounts, so get your tickets now and catch the best minds in the business looking forward, learn about how upcoming trends will impact your business, honor our 2016 Hall of Fame class and network with peers.
