Bringing more sport to more people
We’ve just announced the BBC’s biggest increase in live sport in a generation — aiming to bring an additional 1,000 hours of coverage from around 30 additional sports and events each year. The extra coverage will all be broadcast online on BBC Sport and BBC iPlayer, which means you can watch it on PCs, tablets, mobiles and connected TVs. It also means you can personalise those services to make sure you don’t miss any of your favourite sports whenever they’re on the BBC.
For the last six months we’ve been putting this idea through its paces. We’ve made around 500 hundred hours of content available to test audience appetite, and to make any adjustments we might need to tweak under the hood, before making a commitment as big as this.
It’s worth highlighting that these extra hours will be on top of all the major sport we’re bringing you over the next few years — like the Olympic Games to 2024, the Wimbledon Championships to 2024, the World Cup to 2022, Euro 2020,plus the 6 Nations and FA Cup to 2021. It is all part of our ambition to provide more sport for more people — in partnership with the industry.
We’re working closely with a wide range of sporting bodies to showcase more of these sports to help them grow their audience. And it means we can give our audiences even more choice. We’re giving sports bodies access to our live-streaming technology so they have the means, and access to two of the most popular digital services in the UK — BBC Sport and BBC iPlayer — so they have a platform.
We’re also providing training and expertise from our world-class programme makers to ensure a consistent quality of coverage across the service.
Time well spent with BBC Sport
So what did we learn? Well, there certainly is demand! We have had millions of requests to view this live content.
We streamed a match live from every qualifying round of the FA Cup (a first in the prestigious tournament’s history), shown live Women’s Super League football matches for the first time this season and used new technology to deliver live coverage of the Rugby League Challenge Cup. Plus much more from a diverse range of sports that includes British Basketball League matches, British Athletics events, wheelchair tennis, netball, ice hockey and badminton.
Not to mention all the excitement of England’s under-17s World Cup victory over Spain last weekend when nearly 400,000 watched the match live online.
Where are people watching?
Our strategy is to make this content available across the BBC’s digital services, via BBC Sport and BBC iPlayer products on mobile, desktop, streaming devices and connected TV — and enabling simple and swift discovery on those devices via the Red Button from any BBC linear channel.
For decades, the BBC’s traditional and ‘unconnected’ Red Button service has provided an easy way for audiences to find and watch additional live sports coverage on free-to-air television for many of the UK’s sports fans. Our connected service for such events has additional functionality, such as the ability to watch from the start, clips and highlights up to HD quality and — where rights allow — access to more coverage, which isn’t constrained by broadcast capacity.
For BBC Sport’s biggest events, like Wimbledon, this approach is already delivering record audience numbers, with 24.1m live stream requests. It is also paying dividends for smaller events too. The early signs are that our new live sport offering builds on this, with many users opting to watch the action on their TVs.
For recent Ice Hockey and Badminton streams we tested, 13% and 20% of the audience respectively viewed the action on Connected TV — a higher percentage of viewers than we’d normally see accessing content on those devices.
And the audience is very engaged. Our average watch time for each event across all devices is 15 minutes and much higher on connected TV. This is way above what we have observed on social platforms and is comparable to the numbers we see for the big moments from an Olympics or SW19.
The next chapter in our live coverage journey
This service has its roots in London 2012 where we promised the audience they would ‘never miss a moment’. From there we created ‘BBC Live’ — an internal technology product-platform that allows us to deliver a range of live events. We first rolled this out as a beta at the end of 2013 — as part of an initiative to re-invent the way the BBC covers live events online.
BBC Live has rapidly evolved over the last four years from its initial incarnation to the version we use today. One of the key achievements in this period has been our creation of a cloud-based isomorphic javascript platform. This allows us to transform and aggregate data into templates that power our audience-facing products and create shareable web components. Essentially, it has made it simpler for us to share live content across the BBC’s full range of products and significantly improved the speed of download of our mobile offering.
For example, we were able to efficiently integrate BBC Live into our Connected Red Button and BBC Sport app on Connected TVs as a result of this, helping people discover and watch our live content where they want it most — on the biggest screen in house.
This platform has gone on to be used widely across BBC Online, from all of our major events including Glastonbury and the General Election through to underpinning the BBC News website homepage. Head of Technical Architecture Matthew Clark explains how it works in more detail here.
Alongside the core BBC Live platform, we continue to benefit from the BBC’s cloud-based ‘Video Factory’ — the same technology that is behind BBC iPlayer — and the development of web-based TV production tools that make it possible for us to produce low-cost live event coverage over IP.
All of this combined means we have more capability than ever before to offer a broader range of live events online. And these innovations will be used right across the BBC too. We have already begun rolling out this partnership approach to live coverage with arts events like the Hay Festival and Manchester International Festival.
Overall, the developments we’ve made to our digital technology and the evolution of our editorial practices means the entire BBC can start to reimagine what a public service broadcaster can do.
This new live sport offering is a great example of that. We can collaborate with partners to help them build reach and give audiences more of what they want at the same time — reinventing free-to-air sport in the UK for a digital age.
