In the chaos of March, your fate in NCAA college basketball can be decided by a friendly bounce or a brilliant last-second play call. And those turning points are framed by the kinetic energy of the crowd and reactions around the court and venue.
It’s within this chaos that the essence of college sports thrives — the unique pride and passion of the fans who desire the instant gratification that comes with “survive and advance.” Capturing this essence demands a real-time content ecosystem to grasp the attention of a fanbase hungry for every moment they don’t see on the broadcast.
Make the most of your tournament runs as the action unfolds. Deliver your climatic clips and dramatic behind-the-scenes snapshots as real-time content to your fans and alumni on digital and social channels. Then, watch your engagement, digital content programs and revenue opportunities soar.
How do college athletic programs do this effectively and efficiently? More and more, universities and collegiate conferences are turning to technology. They’re making tech a core part of their real-time content delivery strategy and the infrastructure driving their short-form digital media programs.
Those programs feature the photos, videos, and graphics produced during every tournament game and throughout the season (and beyond!). That content can include pre-game activities, post-game celebrations, interviews, and much more. This engaging media can fill your athletics and university digital channels, and those of your student-athletes.
There are many steps in a short-form content workflow for live sports events that bog down even the largest digital teams. But the tech exists to free up your digital and creative staff, photographers, communications directors, and other school personnel. They can be present in that moment and ready to capitalize on it when all the March Madness magic happens.
You can build a true real-time live event feed for your short-form content. Use automated technology that propels content collection, curation and distribution to everyone who needs it — before the final buzzer. Here are four ways of deploying this tech in your workflow to assemble it.
1. Simplify Live Mobile Capture
Imagine the thrill of a 12-seed upsetting a 5-seed in the first round. Now, picture empowering your content creators with the ability to capture and share that viral locker room celebration in seconds. With technology offering a mobile app experience, this becomes a reality. Say goodbye to managing complex email, text and Slack chains. Now, many pieces of content can be bulk uploaded, tagged and distributed to internal teams and student-athletes in seconds. And it happens while your photographers, staff and other content creators are still shooting. Empowering teams to feed you content on the fly ensures that every moment is ready to be shared with the world as it happens.
2. Centralize Fragmented Content Storage
You’ve got all that real-time content coming in during live games. But organizing and relaying it in the moment is no small feat. Think about all the places your photos, videos and graphic files may currently be stored and shared. Technology can act as a unifying force here. It centralizes the fragmented landscape of content storage that likely includes your photographer’s photo library, cloud files, your video team’s Google Drive and more. By seamlessly integrating with many providers, you can automate the process of importing, aggregating and distributing your content. You can ensure no moment goes unnoticed.
3. Harness the Power of AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has added another layer of efficiency to organizing content and has become a game-changer in college sports. That’s true, especially when your team can’t afford a second to sort through masses of videos and photos to tag, find and deliver the right clip or shot. By automating asset identification and tagging processes, you can organize your “March Madness Moments” with the highest level of confidence and speed. You can do this when evaluating sponsor value or even identifying student-athletes present in an upset celebration through advanced scene detection capabilities. Tapping into the advanced capabilities of AI in sports ensures that every aspect of your real-time content is leveraged to its fullest potential. And your teams can focus on higher-value tasks.
4. Customize Your Real-Time Content Distribution Workflow
Every collegiate athletic department operates differently when it comes to how and where content needs to flow across your ecosystem. Adaptable solutions tailored to your unique workflow for fast distribution are a must-have when thinking about your tech stack. That’s true when your graphic designer receives content on their desktop in the office. It’s also true when your communications director captures content on their phone under the basket to get it to that star athlete when they hit the locker room. Using tech that’s equipped for each individual’s role and setup and ensures bandwidth constraints are no longer a barrier to distributing real-time content is a winning move for any team.
In the madness of March, championships are won and lost in the blink of an eye.
Greenfly makes sure you and your fans don’t miss them.
Greenfly is the leading short-form content infrastructure in sports. We revolutionize digital media workflows for universities and conferences like the Big Ten. Our platform stands battle-tested and proven, providing real-time content results that can mean the difference between millions of impressions and missing the moment entirely.
Our automated integrations, robust mobile app, advanced +AI Vision capabilities, and adaptable workflows empower universities and student-athletes to seize every opportunity to make their mark on the biggest stage in collegiate athletics. So, as the mayhem unfolds, Greenfly will be there when you capture the moment and raise a championship banner.
Are you looking to take your real-time content strategy for live college sports events to the next level? Contact us today — we’d love to help you get there.
