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One of England’s most famous clubs, Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club are currently enjoying success in the Premier League, finishing seventh and qualifying for the Europa League in the 2018-19 season. The club’s digital team makes great use of online video to reach its worldwide audience of fans, offering highlights, behind-the-scenes content and alternative ways to follow live matches if they can’t attend games.
Like many English football clubs, Wolves were already was using StreamAMG’s MediaPlatform to power its video services, including live streaming through WolvesTV in the 2017-18 season, taking advantage of live streaming rights being released to EFL clubs for the first time. The live offering proved popular and successful for the club, and that season ended with Wolves winning the EFL Championship and securing promotion to the Premier League.
As Premier League rights agreements don’t permit clubs to live stream matches through their own platforms, Wolves needed to switch from a primarily live offering to an on demand (VoD) focus in a matter of months.
Without the ability to livestream matches, they had to make the most of existing content and provide a premium viewing experience to meet the expectations of their existing viewers and continue to attract new fans.
The switch had to be future-proof and enhance the offering; Wolves’ video team couldn't afford to spend time manually curating their large archive, or present a diminished service to their fans. The club had thousands of videos in its archive, but no easy way to match them with new content.
Solution
To achieve this transformation they decided to relaunch their service, consolidating all the video content onto the WolvesTV platform to give paying subscribers and registered users an enhanced experience. To organise, publish and distribute video content onto their existing app and website, they turned to StreamAMG’s CloudMatrix system.
CloudMatrix is a video management system that is designed to keep viewers engaged for longer and remove the hassle from managing video content.
The system categorises and tags videos to build playlists and collections based on customisable rules. Content managers can query an archive to quickly create feeds of related content, and presenting users with playlists of content that autoplay, keeping viewers watching more relevant content for longer.
The resulting collections autoplay like boxsets and update automatically with new similar uploads, providing fans with as many relevant videos as they can watch. The playlists can be simple, such as a season’s match highlights, or heavily customised, such as collections featuring a particular player, or a particular stadium.
Designed with an ‘upload once, deliver everywhere’ philosophy, CloudMatrix also acts as a single platform to upload and deliver video content to all of a club’s platforms via API. The system incorporates scheduling and automated holdbacks, triggered by integrated Opta statistics and other third party data feeds, giving content managers total control once the hectic season gets underway.
Results
For the relaunched WolvesTV, CloudMatrix provided the club with a means to pull together all of their on demand content across their all of their existing platforms without the need for labourious, time-consuming manual content curation. This meant Wolves could easily draw on archived content from the club’s storied history to supplement match highlights and exclusive original content.
As well as enabling a quick relaunch, the system gave the content team a quick and easy means to present that content across channels and feeds such as highlights, interviews and boxsets. They also benefited from CloudMatrix integrating seamlessly with their existing website and app, provided by third party suppliers, to create a one stop shop for management and publishing video content.
Dynamic playlists provide Wolves fans with a premium viewing experience to match the relaunched platform’s fresh new look, a key objective for the club. With new uploads instantly available across every platform in every relevant collection, fans can now enjoy fresh content as soon as it’s available.
By querying tagged videos rather than manually searching for videos, the team can also react quickly and capitalise to news and events on the pitch, publishing playlists of relevant content straight away.
Underpinned by CloudMatrix, the relaunch of WolvesTV proved a success, with subscriptions and viewer numbers continuing to grow. The service aligns well with Wolves’ digital ambition with the club launching a number of new initiatives - they became the first club to offer Spanish language commentary for selected games in 2018-19 via WolvesTV.
To discover more CloudMatrix success stories or to request a demo, contact us and speak to an expert on +44 (0) 800 061 2361.
Enquire now“CloudMatrix has helped us to make the most out of our archive by bringing old content back to life. Our supporters are now able to consume hundreds of videos across multiple devices. As well as fan engagement, a dramatic increase in video views, also enables us to commercialise CloudMatrix through partner advertising.”
Russell Jones, Head of Marketing, Wolverhampton Wanderers
