ESPN Media Workshop Officially Under Way
The two-day 30th Anniversary Media Workshop at ESPN has officially started. John Zehr (svp, digital media) started off the event with a session on one of the biggest emerging platforms – mobile. Since 1995, ESPN has been serving sports fans on the go. We are strong believers in the potential of live mobile video and mobile video in general.
“Video is core to everything that ESPN does. It’s part of our storytelling.” — Zehr
Oke Okaro (vp, mobile product development) spoke of upcoming content – a slate of new and innovative offerings. Expect to hear more about what we have in the works for BlackBerry and iPhone devices.
“We feel strongly that of all the different channels we have, mobile is the glue that sticks everything together.” — Okaro
Some quick facts:
– ESPN ranks No. 1 in all of its mobile sports products.
– ScoreCenter has generated two million downloads from the iTunes App Store, and is the #1 application in the sports category. It is available in about 70-80 markets around the world.
– We deliver about 60 million alerts a month and people are continuing to subscribe.
Next up was Damon Phillips (vp, ESPN360.com). Simply put, ESPN360.com is ESPN’s online television network. Our programming approach is illustrated best in the schedule for Sept. 12, when college football, soccer, Aussie Rules Football and BASS fishing collide in the same day in a mix of both exclusive and simulcast coverage.
“We’ve been pretty successful as a company with the affiliate model, and ESPN360.com is a healthy business as a result.” — Phillips
Some questions from the room answered:
Q - Are there limitations of video quality? Can you deliver HD over the network?
A - Yes we can and this year we did several NBA games in HD. We were really just streaming at a higher bit rate but it comes down to computer usage, processing and connection. We’re looking to build more HD offerings this year.
Q - Is ESPN360.com a growing area in terms of manpower and a dedicated staff? A - Definitely, ESPN360.com runs just like a TV network with dedicated resources on the production side as well as marketing and sales.
Patrick Stiegman (vp and exec editor, ESPN.com) concluded the Digital Media session. Two major topics were covered:
1) Multimedia storytelling — ESPN.com’s foundation is based on its contributors. We’ve moved on from calling them writers because all their jobs now entail multimedia. As much as we want content to be on the best screen available, we also want the best format for the content.
2) Social media — Live chats via SportsNation have proved to be a powerful tool for us, particularly for our live events where we’ve used the space as a sort of virtual press box. Patrick went into the plans of integrating all social media tools and funneling them into the SportsNation platform for an engaging real-time media experience, including the use of Twitter.
About that Twitter memo…
– “It’s an attempt to broaden the opportunity and embrace it but do so in a way that stays within our guidelines.” — Stiegman
– “We want to make sure that breaking news is vetted. We want to be first and accurate, but always accurate over first, every time.” — Stiegman
Stay tuned, our 30th Anniversary session is up next…
