With the launch of the World Cup last week delivering ratings highs, social is also setting records. To make the most of the opportunity, FIFA partner Univision partnered with SnappyTV to deliver instant highlights of every matchup live on Twitter. Saturday saw Univision ranking as the top network across all English and Spanish language broadcast networks in terms of Twitter activity, with the World Cup match between England and Italy ranking as the top program across all English and Spanish language broadcast networks that day in terms of Twitter activity.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with David Yun, head of product at SnappyTV about the company and how it has leveraged sports to become a social staple.
Yun on the company: SnappyTV has been around for about four years now, the whole premise of the company was centered around this idea that social media was becoming more mainstream. There was a huge conversation happening around sports, TV content and news that were happening in all of these social networks. The thing that was missing from the equation was the actual video itself. You’d log into Facebook or Twitter and someone would post ‘Did you see that moment? It was hilarious or what a great goal!’ Then you’d have to go on a wild goose chase to actually try to see the goal. So we wanted to marry live-streaming content with the actual social conversation. What we did was build out a platform that allows our customers to create real-time highlights and push that out to social media. That’s where we made a name for ourselves.
On sports: We started in sports because they have such a passionate fanbase and people can talk constantly about sports on social as well as because it has that live component and has a sense of urgency. Sports really helped us grow and make a name for ourselves. We now have a large numbers of customers who now use us just to edit videos in general, for example NASCAR, who uses us our platform to cut out highlights from their race days. They push that video not only to social but also to their Sprint Cup app and their websites.
On partners: We’ve worked with the NBA, which is taking their best moments from their games, clipping out highlights and posting them to Facebook under #NBArapidreplay. We also work the NHL, with the NFL for their Twitter Amplify campaign. From a rights holder perspective, we pretty much work with all of the major media companies here in the states, CBS Sports, NBC Sports, and FOX Sports. We also have some pretty good penetration internationally as well.
On results: There are a couple of different benefits that they are really getting out of our platform. The first is really about speed and the ability to create video content quickly. What we’ve learned from our research is that if you can get your clip out within the first ten minutes of it happening live, there is this viral coefficient that we’ve figured out where you are going to get 10X more views on that, versus if you pushed it out an hour later. The fact that we have the technology to do that and marry it with where your audience is has allowed us to create this perfect storm of great content and audience that drives virality. The other piece of this is around user productivity. For example, we’ve worked with Turner Sports with March Madness. Because our platform is cloud-based and easy to use, what they’ve done is outsource the editing of the clip to a set of students from Ball State University who cut clips for them and then those clips surface on their apps and on social. Pac-12 is another example of that.
On the World Cup: With Univision, we are helping to power them for their Twitter Amplify campaign. They’ve been feeding out highlights from all of the World Cup games and sponsored by Verizon. We are the platform that’s allowing them to get these clips out into social and marrying with the ad creative and deliver all of that together with Twitter.
