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What Drives Viewers to Brands in Sports and eSports?

Learn more about sports streaming at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete presentation from Streaming Media West, ESS102. Focus on Fans: Attracting Eyeballs, Keeping Them Hooked, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Matt Smith: It's all about sports rights. So, if you have rights to the content that those viewers want to see, they're going to flock to your platform. There are four-letter sports networks in this country and three-letter sports networks in this country who have paid a lot of money for sports rights that drive that audience to that content. Now a lot of those, as you started by saying, have broadcast networks, but now we're in an era where creating a channel getting that content to an audience of viewers is orders of magnitude simpler or less expensive than it used to be. We'll talk about scale in a few minutes, 'cause that's where it gets really tricky, but rights are key to getting those audiences flowing your way.

Michael Bucklin: I agree, rights obviously matter. You know, beyond rights, developing a scale that allows you to responsibly see a return on that, on those rights is obviously matters as well. But in leu of that, I think that we see people gravitate towards personalities. Everyone can cover sports. Some people tend to do it at a personality level, a bit better than others. Gus Johnson, I think, is God's gift to football. God's gift to the internet. And he makes every single college football play or college basketball play that much more exciting. We've also seen that personalities tend to have large audiences, and if you're a great personality sometimes you can take that audience with you to cover the sport that you care about and that you're passionate about.

Stefan Richardson: I was just going to echo that actually. What I see a lot in all the Esports that I've been working on now, is even the commentators are, they're portable, they're take able, like they have their own brand and now we're looking like, if I'm doing a show like Fornite or we're doing like CSGO or something else. I'll see the same commentators coming across. And like you said, you have to have the rights originally to do that, but I'm seeing the companies that I work with hiring specific members of talent because they have created their own brand. And they bring that audience with them while they broadcast that show. So it's the individual brand, then, of your commentators now actually starting to make a big difference in terms of the audience that we're seeing.

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