Kaimaan

Traditionally sports organizations small and big have been using media (news paper and TV) to deliver their their content to the masses. They need partners who provide the technology and the business model to deliver messages to large audiences. Now that more and more people follow sports online instead of traditional channels new models are developing. The more control the sports organization has over the content around their brand the easier it is to “be a medium” and deliver information or data to audiences.

The first step of becoming a medium is having control over the content that is provided to the fans. On the web clubs do not need media companies to deliver or monetize their content as they do on TV or in other traditional media. The openness of the web and the variety of tools available creates new opportunities to manage media without giving out too much. This is easy to say and hard to do in practice, but only after implementing this model the brand can have full control to content and be a competitive “medium”.

Taking control does not mean that traditional media does not have role in the value chain. They are good partners when maximizing the audience. All online media should have strategies for delivering content on their own websites, on social media (facebook etc.) and other places. I found an interesting video/blog post about “How To Build a Digital Brand Universe” from Amy Martin. Tools like that are helpful when planning an online media strategy. In the Digital Brand Universe there are three different layers.

1. Homebase, the official property
2. Direct affiliates
3. The social nets

I think that the revenue models should go through all the layers of the Digital Brand Universe and sports club should have control over the layers.

The second step in becoming a medium is to create dialog between the brand and the audience. This has been a very hot issue in traditional media for the past years. User participation and user generated content is part of our everyday life when rating, sharing commenting news in social media. I believe that after sports clubs realize their role as “media” they will move to the same direction (and using same tools) as traditional media. Enabling the brand-fan dialog increases the monetization opportunities and creates value through increased traffic. Here is an interesting blog post about how Real Madrid and FC Barcelona increased the media value by recruiting players with high media value.

Being media means being in control!

Management and monetization of online video goes hand in hand. It is very hard to monetize video with any model if you do not know where it is delivered to or how many people are watching it. Managing video is about making decisions about to whom, what, when and where.

To whom you deliver content is the most important part of managing online video. At least in commercial perspective but i think that also in other cases. The better you know your audience the easier it is to plan other parts of managing online video. What – the second important feature of online video. We have all heard it many times “content is the king” without good content all other parts of managing online video become irrelevant. When as a indicator of time is very important in online video. Specially if you are doing live video streaming. The most important feature of successful live stream is that there is enough time before the event for marketing and other preparations. This is also important when talking about on-demand videos. Time matters. Where is a key question when delivering video and trying to maximize the number of viewers. Bands for example like to deliver content to their own homepage, MySpace and Facebook fan pages. The easier it is to do this more time there is left for other important things.

After you have figured out the management part of your online video project well enough, monetization should not be a problem. If you know your audience and sync your content creation according to their needs they should be ready to pay for that. Or if the audience is big enough brands should be ready to pay for you to pass on their message to your viewers. Of course in real life this is much harder to do than it might sound here. If video production is not your core business you can use it to support other business activities. Many sports organizations use online video to get more people involved with sport without any bigger ambitions for monetization. The statistics and reporting videos are very important in the video ecosystem and specially when monetizing online video. The Business Of Online Video blog has good article about The Importance of Good Reporting and Analytics In The Video Ecosystem. Check it out!

This is a post about brand and fan created content. We are constantly developing better tools for our customers in Sports and Music to manage all video content around their brand. We see Floobs as a video delivery and monetization platform for Internet on mobile and PC. We help our customers to manage and monetize different types of content created around the brand.

Brand created content has two different sub-categories. The brand (sports club or band) might have their own production team or a partner who creates content for their WebTV. For example FC Sevilla Spanish La Liga team has production company for their local cable TV channel. They currently use Floobs to stream that TV channel to the web. In Floobs we see more and more the employees of the brand taking part in content creation as the tools are getting increasingly simple to use. At the moment this is especially true in the music industry with bands but more and more in sports as well.

Fan created content. This is something that we are developing and piloting with our beta customers in fall/winter 2009. The idea is that for a fan it is more valuable to create content to the same place where their favorite player or musician is updating content. Our goal is to create a dialog between the brand and their fans. We enable fans to upload content to our customers WebTVs (in club/band’s website). The content is delivered side by side with the brand content. The WebTV manager has tools to manage the user generated content and they can either pre-moderate or take down content that is not suitable for their WebTV.

We have been talking about bloggin in Floobs pretty much since day 1 and now Jani actually did something about it. He installed the blogging platform and presented this great opportunity to our team. Thanks Jani for doing that. I actually don`t know yet what all I am going to blog about. I bet that most of it will be related to floobs stuff but I might also use this channel to express my thoughts on other subjects such as entrepreneurship. We`ll see where blogging takes me. I hope to get lots of comments and raise conversation. You can find me on Jaiku (Kaitsu) and Twitter (Kaimaan).