As the World Cup looks toward the next round of play, viewers continue to flock to on multiple screens to absorb the tournament. Univision Digital has had an especially good run, as the Univision Deportes App ranked as the top free sports app in the Google Play Store for the fourth day in a row heading into the weekend. The first eight days of that tournament (spanning June 12-19) scored as the top eight most visited days in Univision Digital history, according to Adobe Analytics, while the Brazil/Mexico matchup broke two records on June 17 to rank as Univision’s most-watched live stream ever, and surpassed Univision Digital’s record for highest concurrent live streams for a single event.
The app comes as part of a partnership between Univision and Neulion to upgrade the digital multi-screen experience. Through the partnership, NeuLion delivers authenticated live content for Univision Deportes with interactive features including real-time live highlights, stats, schedules, news, rosters and more for the TV Everywhere experience. Cynopsis Sports spoke with Scott Levine, Senior Vice President, Products at Univision and Chris Wagner, EVP and co-founder at NeuLion, about the digital strategy, the record traffic and how the World Cup will be leveraged for the future.
Levine on approaching the World Cup: In 2013, we started building ourselves up for live streaming of the World Cup. We had already seen huge usage of people that were coming and consuming other games, especially on mobile devices. Over the course of the year, we came to the conclusion that we wanted to do something on an epic scale. We needed an industry-leading partner that could help us get to that level. Toward the end of the year, we worked with Neulion to implement all of Univision Deportes’ live streaming around the core elements of the Neulion platform. That led to the digital launch of what you see today as Univision Deportes, which is an online experience, a web experience, an app experience, taking the best of what we provide which is great content expertise, great visuals, etc. and combines it with the expertise of Neulion to create a one-stop shop for soccer fans.
Wagner on clips: One of the things we haven’t done with any of the other leagues or brands that we work with is the way these clips get published during the live match, not just during the broadcast, but also multi-camera angle clips and how those clips can be watched and immediately pushed out on someone’s favorite social network. It is literally touch it with your finger, see the icon and Tweet it and having that happen as the match progresses along with the live stat is a very cool experience. I think a lot of other big sports brands are looking at it and saying ‘Wow.’
Levine on World Cup numbers: We are seeing fantastic usage here from the users’ perspective. There is a great story that has been told every single day of huge usage on both the TV network as well as on the digital products. The Mexico/Brazil game was one of our most-streamed games ever, probably coming in around 3.6-3.7 million streams. We are seeing huge growth in concurrents, the other day we had around 620,000 concurrent people on watching the experience at the same time. That shows a complete interest that our fans, as well as all soccer fans, have for this and not just in Spanish. It’s a bilingual audience and we are seeing huge pops in engagement for games that aren’t just Mexico and Brazil. About 24-25% of the people coming into the app are choosing to use the app in English.
Wagner on challenges: We are very satisfied but we still have a lot of work to do. Neulion did 47,000 live sports events last year. It is a space we know very well. All the synchronization of live content, stats, multiple cameras, scores, primary video, these are all things that we built our business around. We need to make sure this was all intuitive for the consumer so that it was all easy to find and everything was synched up the right way. It was a great amount of fun to do it around the World Cup.
Levine on the future: How do we build for the future? The first 56 games are not authenticated but the remaining games will be. We want to use this time to work with the audience and help them get authenticated because that is good for everybody at the end of the day. After that, we start working on other different types of content we can bring into the experience. How do we push forward on that and grow the engagement inside the app? For one, imagine what we can do clipping all of these games and building a library around that. Football fans could use that as the one place to go. There are a lot of things that we are going to start looking at around that to grow with the audience. We will also be bringin