Revolutionizing the viewing experience for UEFA Club and EURO 2024 Competitions
ServusTV is Austria's largest private broadcaster, offering live streams of popular shows, news, and sports like Formula 1, MotoGP, ATP and UEFA Champions League. With excellent content already in place, the goal of the collaboration with Ease Live was to further drive audience engagement, increase consumption of content and enable new revenue streams through advertisement.
Audience engagement across the screens
The UEFA Club Competitions (Champions League, Europa League and Conference League) viewing experience on ServusTV now features interactive overlays with real-time stats, instant video highlights, and engaging polls across web, mobile and tablets, covering both 1st and 2nd screen experiences. This initiative is powered by Ease Live's technology, which integrates data from Stats Perform and engages fans with automated content. The new features will also engage fans during UEFA EURO 2024.
Strong results
In the year following the launch with Ease Live the ServusTV On app experienced a signifficant increase in key KPIs for their streaming service.
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The UEFA Champions League results already speak for themselves: almost half of the audience engage with interactive content, with 78% responding to live poll questions – leading to a 35% increase in total viewership minutes. The Ease Live powered interactivity puts the fan in charge of the experience – a particular fan favourite is the chance to instantly watch highlights on demand, immediately after the goal has happened.
David Morgenbesser
Chief Commercial Officer
Red Bull Media House
Portion of audience interactive
Increase in total minutes watched compared to previous season
Response rates to live polls
Engaging fans on 2nd screen
Building on the huge success of deploying interactive streaming experiences across the primary screens, the latest launch is a brand new 2nd screen football companion app, which is taking interactivity to the next level on the Austrian broadcaster’s coverage UEFA Club Competitions.
Instant highlights
As part of the 2nd screen experience, users can see instant highlights tied to key game moments as soon as they have reached that point in the stream. The new highlights feature is achieved without cutting any video - simply by using Ease Live's ability to jump in the HLS or Dash streams during live - to a selected data event. Once completed, the application returns the user back to live.
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The new second screen companion app is a powerful way for us to enable our viewers to engage more deeply with the sports and teams they love. We also offer our advertising partners the highly innovative opportunity to place their brands in an emotional live sports enviroments.
David Morgenbesser
Chief Commercial Officer
Red Bull Media House
Monetizing new ad inventory
One key motivation for ServusTV was to enable new ad inventory to be surfaced during game action. Ease Live enabled client side rendered ads to be surfaced at key game moments, directly integrated with Google Ad Manager.
78% of users voted for the man of the match
A popular feature amongst the audiences was voting for their favourite players, regularly generating high response rates.
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Delivering interactive experiences across the screens is all about engaging audiences in order to enable new monetization automatically and at scale. We know exactly when the users are engaging with content and we are able to serve new ad inventory during key game moments - generating millions of impressions and ad displays. This capability provided ServusTV with the confidence that our unique fan engagement solution would meet every challenge, even during peak moments in the UEFA Champions League. I’m looking forward to ensuring that ServusTV enhances the viewing experience of Austrian football fans during UEFA EURO 24.
Kjetil Horneland
CEO
Ease Live
Strong partnership
The initial launch of the Champions League experience was followed by quick iterations, adding Europa League and Conference League competitions. A key to the success of the project was working closely together as a team to share insights, planning next steps and delivering frequent rollouts of new features. One of the benefits of Ease Live being fully web based, is that new updates could be launched quickly and independently of any app store updates.
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Working with Ease Live has not only transformed our broadcast capabilities quickly but has also set the stage for future innovation in sports broadcasting. We are looking forward to collaborating further!
David Morgenbesser
Chief Commercial Officer
Red Bull Media House
Shortening time to market
From initial start of the project to launch, Ease Live enabled a turnkey football package to be deployed in less than a month, allowing Servus TV to get to market quickly for their web and mobile apps.
Ease Live is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution embraced by sports leagues, broadcasters, and content providers globally. This interactive overlay platform gives leagues and media companies streaming live sports and other live events the necessary tools to create, build, and provide interactivity to millions of fans and other viewers across multiple platforms in real time. The platform delivers edge-rendered graphical overlays, adding interactive experiences to existing TV and Over-The-Top (OTT) services and apps. With Ease Live, sports fans can interact with in-game statistics, participate in watch parties, polls, trivia, access instant replays and gaming – all without leaving the event.