Sports and Audio on Demand: Should I Podcast?
Last week I was invited to speak at the “Startups and Innovations” section at the Sports Analytics Conference. There I shared my thoughts on audio-on-demand and Sports being a heavenly match. In an earlier panel involving digital directors from Cricket Australia, AFL and Channel 7 (Olympics TV partner) my audience question — “how does Podcasting fit into your strategy?” — had the responses circle around using audio-on-demand for trialling content in an inexpensive environment. One panellist even eloquently described audio as being “a shit load cheaper” to make than video.
Everyone agreed that Podcasting is hot — so my talk below emphasises my thoughts on how it can be best used in the sports context.
Audio is a great way to engage with sports fans. It’s so easy to make — I’ve seen teams Podcast, throw up interviews at half time, get match previews from players and tweet them out. It’s constant, entertaining fan engagement.
Even my favourite team — the West Coast Eagles — gets two great players Schoey and Butler into a studio each week to record a Podcast. More teams should be doing this. It’s easy to do and Podcasting is hot.
Take for example one of our partners Fulham FC, it’s their offseason but they’re still using Omny Studio to get players talking to fans in the most engaging way possible on Twitter.
This clip, using a mobile phone, would have taken minutes to make using Omny Studio.
This is something I’m most proud of, because we were the first in the world to do it. Before Omny Studio you were able to know certain things about your audio — download count, what apps downloaded it, whether it was desktop or mobile and a geography heat map of where it was listened to. But Podcast measurement is underdeveloped — not even the biggest platforms in the world have an answer.
However, we at Omny Studio built a world first — consumption analytics. For the first time, using our platform you are able to see what parts of a clip were actually listened to. What percentage of the audience heard a particular moment of the audio. Also our drop-off graphs show exactly where people tuned out — and we’ve got a couple of other cool features — like time spent listening, verified plays and a summary that shows what percentage of listeners heard the clip all the way to the end.
Noone else in the world has this for audio. Analytics and data around content are one of the pillars of our company. Which makes us an invaluable platform, especially for advertisers.
You have active, engaged fans on social media in sports. It’s the holy grail of audience engagement — and by connecting your audio with any of our partner ad platforms you can start making money right away.
Omny Studio is an all-in-one audio solution. From Podcasting to short clips for social media. We have a web-based application that allows you to manage all your audio content in and from the cloud. We’re a software stack, replacing a convoluted production workflow with one simple to use platform. We are complete end-to-end: from on-air to online — designed specifically for broadcast, radio and live applications making us PERFECT for Sport.
What separates us from a plain old Podcast host is our ability to do live recordings of on-air broadcasts. This means you can capture the game like never before.
You can tag an amazing passage of play, mark a players goal or even track sponsor mentions to create a complete searchable archive of your team’s games.
Also Omny Studio is FAST — it is designed to easily reach an audience anywhere, on any device. We publish to your website, Twitter, Facebook and apps using widgets, RSS feeds, our open API or our mobile SDK’s.
To prove how quick it is, in less than 20 seconds we can take audio of a goal that was just scored, edit it down to just the magic moment, click publish and post it to Twitter or Facebook instantly. That was a goal to a tweeted audio grab in under a minute.
So I’m here today, looking for partnerships. If your sports team or media company deals in audio at all, or you want to, you should speak to us.
That’s a list of just some of our customers who make sports products with Omny Studio. I would love to see someone reading this, added to the list.
Matt Saraceni is the Head of Content at Omny Studio. He is passionate about Sports and how audio can be a part of the digital strategy of any team. If you’d like to work together email — matt [at] omnystudio [dot] com.
