How Sky Sports keep on top in the digital world

It’s an exciting time for Sky Sports. A new Premier League rights deal – both broadcast and digital rights – kicks off this August.

Mark Alford, Head of Digital Publishing at Sky Sports, is the man trying to keep Sky Sports ahead of the competition in the digital world.

The issue that Sky, and many digital publishers face, is they want maximum engagement, which requires heavy social media use, but also want maximum traffic on their own sites and apps. Alford is embracing the challenge:

“The good thing is we will have the match action and all the goals. We’re investigating our content strategy for multiple platforms. We’re looking to develop our social channels, engage with our audience and our subscriber base there. But we can’t ever ignore SkySports.com and our portfolio of apps, because our audience there is significant, and it is really engaged as well. It’s where our customers come to.”

“It is a constant balance, obviously we like to drive our audience back to what I call our traditional Sky Sports platforms. But it is also fine to have discussions, debates and conversations with our audience on other platforms. It’s how you keep things fresh, it’s how you keep people engaged and ultimately, you hope, they return back to our owned platforms.”

That challenge has become apparent through its news coverage. Sky Sports News have recently started breaking news on Twitter with video from the newsroom. The aim is to break the story first, but on a platform like Twitter, it’s important to make your story to stand out from the crowd. Rich media is now the priority,

“It’s a slight change of strategy. We will always try to break the news simultaneously on Twitter as we do on the linear TV show, and on our Sky Sports digital platforms. However we do prioritise being first with the video clip. So if we have to take our foot off the pedal in terms of breaking the story in one tweet, we will: to make sure we are first with the video clip. Because, video is much richer media and it’s far more engaging and popular with our audience than just a bog standard tweet.”

That pursuit of rich media has led them to embrace the latest movement in the online space: live.

Facebook, Twitter and Periscope are all pushing their live products from a variety of angles, and Alford said Sky are making steps into that world:

“Live video is very much the zeitgeist at the moment. We’re involved in that movement, we’re having a fair amount of success with our Facebook Live videos. Crucially that’s because of the sorts of people we can put in front of the camera. We’ve got the best pundits around, and we have access to the best sportsmen and women as well. So we’ve had Facebook Live sessions with Lewis Hamilton, we’ve had Anthony Joshua, we’ve had Eddie Jones in. I hope we do more and more of that sort thing. It’s proving popular.”

On the more traditional Sky Sports digital channels there are new developments as well. Sky Sports have been the home of Premier League football for more than 25 years. For the 2016/17 season they will have another feather in their cap, with the return of near-live rights to their platforms. Sky last had the near-live rights in 2007 – when the digital distribution of sports rights was still in its infancy. Alford explains how the latest rights addition will link into Sky’s existing platforms:

“It’s exciting times at Sky, we’re looking forward to getting near-live out on our mobile platforms. We will be re-launching our football score centre app, which is going to be our hero product for the Premier League clips. You’ll be able to get the goals pretty much as they go in (outside the Saturday afternoon black-out). We’ll be looking to deliver those on the social spaces as well. Twitter is likely, and obviously on SkySports.com through the week as well. It’s not just Premier League, we’ve got La Liga, and the English Football League, as well as the Eredivisie and the MLS.”

Sky have long led the way in sports terrestrial broadcasting world, and they seem determined to show the same leadership in evolving the digital space as well.

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