Yesterday’s story about Facebook and the launch of it’s new Sports Stadium prompted significant interest and comment from among our members.
The simple aggregating of content under the event, what your friends are talking about, the expert view and stats could quickly become the default social media space for watching the biggest events and for engaging with fans at the most relevant time.
How Facebook will engage with rights holders and brands and how it will deal with the thorny subject of clip rights will be one of the sports marketing stories of the year.
“Even with Facebook’s enormous reach the ultimate success of Sports Stadium may well depend on the quality of the content they are able to offer within this feature,” said Jody MacDonald, Senior Associate at specialist sports law firm Coachman’s who advised the FAI on it’s recent streaming deal.
“Twitter and SnapChat both already offer similar features for sports events and have entered into official partnerships with sports bodies such as the NFL and MLB to ensure high quality clips and behind-the-scenes content. It will be interesting to see if Facebook follows suit.
“Social media platforms have realised that sport (particularly live sport) drives a huge amount of the activity on their platforms and there is now a race to develop features to capitalise on this. Twitter and SnapChat have made similar moves already with their Moments and Story Explorer features respectively.
“This trend presents huge opportunities for sports bodies if they can put themselves in the middle of the conversation but there are threats too – it will be interesting to see whether Facebook looks to partner with sports bodies to help improve the feature and if so whether this affects their approach to infringing content such as live clips which will inevitably be posted by some fans”.
“Social media is fundamentally changing the way fans consume sports content. Sports bodies need to adapt quickly in order to remain part of the conversation. This means embracing social, becoming a content publisher in your own right and in some cases developing official partnerships with social media platforms to leverage features such as this.”
