LiveU – Clubs go bananas for LiveU’s sports production solutions
Ronen Artman, VP Marketing, LiveU
As the M&E industry continues to evolve, the growing pressure to produce more content at lower costs, while retaining the same high-quality, has increased the demand for cost-effective, flexible IP-based production models. As well as enabling broadcasters to utilize ground-to-cloud-to-crowd turnkey sports production workflows, this has opened up new opportunities for diverse and niche sports to create dynamic live content and to drive online fan engagement.
With greater access to digital channels and more fans watching content online, lower division clubs and other organizations can produce broadcast-quality content cost-effectively using remote, on-site or cloud production. IP-based production solutions also give smaller clubs direct access to Gen-Z and millennials who demand authentic and personalized storytelling and who are more likely to watch sports content on a mobile device.
Bringing ‘banana ball’ to the masses
An organization that’s fully embraced the remote production workflow is growing sports franchise the Savannah Bananas. Starting out in 2016 as an unknown college summer baseball team, the Savannah Bananas wanted to expand its reach, create a demand to go to games, build a fan base, drive ticket sales, and sell merchandise. Owners Jesse and Emily Cole and the production crew knew they needed to make their broadcast games available online to introduce viewers to the banana ball sport, a fast-paced version of baseball mixed with entertainment elements, and to generate brand loyalty and fan following.
With their popularity growing fast, they decided to take their ‘baseball circus’ on the road, but traditional production methods were off the table due to cost and complexity – production trucks, full crews and satellite connections were beyond the budget. Savannah Bananas turned to LiveU to enable them to deliver high-quality broadcasts from everywhere the team went. It leveraged the company’s remote production solution including IP bonded cellular LU800 multi-cam and compact LU300S encoders for connectivity and a REMI production workflow.
“The LiveU solution gave us the ability to quickly set up our entire production, while still having the gear we use and the crew that normally runs the show from our home base in Savannah, Georgia,” said Chad Reese, Coordinating Producer, Savannah Bananas. This solution allowed the Bananas to not have to worry about connectivity in any stadium or venue they attended, relying fully on the LiveU EcoSystem and LiveU’s patented cellular bonding technology.
When tickets went on sale for their first tour they sold out in minutes. In 2024, they doubled the number of games covered and are doing even more this year. The team’s gone from selling a handful of tickets and producing content hidden behind a paywall to millions of loyal fans and 1.85 million YouTube subscribers.
Savannah Bananas has continued to elevate its productions and gained attention from broadcasters such as ESPN and NESN who would normally send out a truck to cover the games. Instead, they’ve leveraged the production created by the lean Savannah Bananas crew. The fan engagement it receives from the live broadcasts and content across social media has boosted revenue streams, including ticket and merchandise sales.
Savannah Bananas’ Chad Reese added, “When it comes to LiveU our imagination is the only thing that’s holding us back.”
Adding value to live feeds
LiveU’s dedicated to producing innovative tools that help storytellers to engage viewers with diverse content while controlling costs. An example of this is the cost-effective localized solution provided to Skweek for European basketball coverage. Skweek is a basketball and lifestyle streaming platform for fans, players and brands that provides a pay-per-view service with exclusive broadcasting rights for the men’s EuroLeague Basketball in France and Monaco.
Throughout the season, Skweek delivers up to 12 live games simultaneously each evening and provides comprehensive coverage of the EuroCup. Specializing in high-quality live streaming, it offers sports fans in-depth localized access to top-tier basketball events, ensuring seamless broadcasts across multiple platforms.
Skweek receives the international feed from IMG and ingests it in the LiveU Studio cloud-native production service, adding branding and French commentary sent directly from the commentators themselves who connect to LiveU Studio as a ‘remote guest’. This gives commentators greater flexibility and reduces preparation time. Skweek also streams occasional games with live local commentary directly to YouTube and other social media platforms using LiveU Studio. Leveraging the ability to publish to multiple destinations, it can ingest live feeds on its subscription-based video-on-demand (VOD) service and stream them elsewhere.
Delivering live commentary to the cloud is a different way of working for commentators who quickly adapted to the change and have found it to be a more streamlined process. A single LiveU Studio feature saved Skweek significant costs and has given them autonomy by allowing them to fully control their live remote cloud-based commentary and distribution workflows.
Going lightweight
In 2024, LiveU further expanded storytelling opportunities for diverse and minority sports with its remote production “ground-to-cloud-to-crowd” Lightweight Sports Production model. It provides a complete capture-mix-share solution using three key components – LiveU Field Encoders, LiveU Mobile Data and LiveU Studio – making live video capture, program production and distribution collaborative and straightforward.
Through its customized solutions, LiveU is empowering streamers, niche sports and lower tier clubs to embrace a lightweight sports production model whether that’s REMI, on-site or cloud. Clubs and other sports organizations have the ability to tap into local advertising revenue opportunities using SCTE-35. Frame accurate live switching ensures every live source is frame synced in the production environment and LiveU’s Instant Replay tool provides variable speed playback with two to four replay channels available.
LiveU’s democratizing high-quality sports production, allowing any size organization to access broadcast level workflows without the high costs and complexity.
