Playing with the dreams of sports fanatics, The Colorado Sports Cast Network, is an online haven for those who live, dream and breathe sports. Since 2008, the Colorado Sports Cast Network has been providing team marketing services to high school and club sports teams in the United States - from inner-city public schools to rural community schools and to suburban private clubs.
The Colorado Sports Cast Network provides an opportunity for high schools and other programs to have their games broadcast over the Internet with unlimited digital advertising opportunities.
The broadcasts are a fund raising opportunity for programs by allowing corporate team sponsors to advertise during a game. In addition to the game, the broadcast can include pre/post game interviews, coach's insight, and player perspectives.
The Colorado Sports Cast Network also provides web site services to high schools and other sports organizations. The Web site system is designed for sports teams using their respective images, colours and logo.
Key Challenges
As a regularly sought out broadcaster of sporting live streaming events, The Colorado Sports Cast Network had produced over a 100 live video webcasts for a leading High School in Colorado and they were looking for a platform which would enable them to provide live streaming, video-on-demand and pay-per-view options to ensure that their sports events could be monetized discretionarily, i.e. some would be paid for and some would be available for free. On evaluating several partner companies, they realised that none of them could offer all the features they wanted, for example if a partner offered live and on-demand video streaming, they did not have PPV capability and vice versa.
With an emphasis on high-quality video production for live events, the Colorado Sports Cast Network has moved to the forefront as the preferred site for sports fans world over. They were also particular that their streaming quality matches their high quality videos, negating buffering completely, immaterial of the traffic. Here again, their challenge in vendor selection was the fact that most streaming companies used third party CDNs which increases costs. They preferred to work with a company which had its own CDN which would mean that the price benefits would be far better.
Since their site attracted a large fan following, they wanted to ensure that viewers' interest is always safeguarded. Therefore, for those who missed the live streaming, they wanted to make available archives of their webcasts for as long as a year.
Solution
StreamingVideoProvider's platform provided the ideal solution for The Colorado Sports Cast Network, by offering them varied options for uploading their videos, including internal (using internal uploaders located in the SVP control panel) and external uploaders (accepting videos from outside sources. Open to all major video formats, enabled with free flash FLV encoding and transcoding, and most importantly with no file restrictions, the platform provided an immediate solution to The Colorado Sports Cast Network's 100+ video webcasts.
Live streaming
The platform's total simplicity meant they could create an account, switch on the video device and then stream live their content. Using the platform, Colorado Sports Cast Broadcasting was able to stream live games with ease and with no delay. The option to predefine schedules, i.e. start and finish, meant the Colorado Sports Cast Broadcasting had good control over the platform.
Pay-Per-View
By using the Pay-Per-View feature, Colorado Sports Cast Broadcasting is able to monetize its content. They can set up the desired ticket and can mix and match ticketing options.
Benefits
Summarizing the benefits, Colorado Sports Cast Broadcasting rates "ease of administration use" top on the list of benefits it derived from partnering with StreamingVideoProvider. A platform which is fully automated and requires minimal human intervention is what they wanted and that continues to provide them with the flexibility to upload videos at their convenience.
The second top benefit is the user experience which Colorado Sports Cast Broadcasting is able to offer to its end customers. Live streaming is extremely important for much awaited events and with StreamingVideoProvider's platform, live streaming performance has attracted a larger audience than they planned or anticipated.
StreamingVideoProvider's Pay Pal integration is a strong benefit, simplifying the pay-per-view feature Colorado Sports Cast Broadcasting extends to its viewers.
