With an estimated 400 million fans worldwide, professional golf is at its zenith. A new generation of exciting players compete at the top of leader boards around the world providing an enticing platform for fans, broadcasters and sponsors in this multi-billion dollar industry.
One of the most prestigious golf competitions remains the European Tour. Annually, hundreds of elite golfers compete in 47 tournaments across 26 countries – culminating in the high-profile, season-ending DP World Tour Championship in Dubai.
Keen to deliver the best golfing action highlights to media partners and fans, the European Tour faced severe challenges. It took their media partners hours to access content from tournament locations with some resorting to sending crews to the venues themselves to produce their own highlights at significant expense.
The European Tour approached Deltatre looking for a solution that would make their golf content easily accessible to its media partners in a much shorter time period. The requirement was for a fast, reliable cloud video editing platform that could support the time critical delivery of video content.
Deltatre chose Blackbird for the live editing and fast turnaround delivery of European Tour highlights. Satellite signals from golfing venues are sent to Deltatre’s operation centre in London. Editors log in to Blackbird through any browser and are able to edit streams seconds after live using a rich, easy-to-use suite of editing tools. Short clips of the best action can be rapidly produced as well as multi-clip edits, compilations and crafted highlight reels – with sponsor branding and adverts and other commercial messaging easily added.
“With Blackbird, we are able to turn content around far more quickly than with traditional methods.” – Pete Burns, VP EMEA Business Development and Account Management, Deltatre
Deltatre makes all of this great golf content accessible to its media partners through its Brightcove hosted CDN. The European Tour estimates that the time taken to make clips and highlights available to its media partners has been reduced from 5 hours to 5 minutes since the introduction of Blackbird.
The European Tour also uses Blackbird to rapidly publish clips and highlights to its website (www.europeantour.com) and official social channels including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter – all in broadcast quality outputs. Players, tournaments and sponsors can be easily tagged to drive content reach, engagement and monetization.
The European Tour continues to grow from strength to strength. An increasing number of fans are following this elite competition with high-profile sponsors such as Rolex, BMW and Emirates keen to reach this affluent demographic. Blackbird continues to play a vital role in building online awareness, engagement and revenues for one of the world’s most prestigious golfing competitions
