Case Study: Online Fight Channel—Niche Sport Webcasting That Pays
Oliveira and his team have noticed this and realised that the most famous "brand" fighters have global followings. While the niche sport-equipment manufacturers helped to get the initial framework of the service up and running by buying traditional ad spots on the site, it is to the masters that Oliveira and his team have focussed their attention when looking at models to cover the costs of video production and distribution.
Many of these masters are now building online training programmes with Oliveira, and they are making extensive use of video to convey moves, techniques and strategies to their audiences. Some of these are loss-led by the masters, who benefit by upsell to either selling places in real-world training programmes or who are even going as far as producing full series of training programmes entirely online, which they are distributing through Online Fight Channel on a pay-per-view/revenue share model.
Given that ju-jitsu is a niche sport compared to football or baseball, the production workflow design is critical to ensuring that costs do not exceed revenues.
Oliveira keeps the production team extremely small. "People-time is usually the biggest overhead, so keeping the teams really small is vital," he says. "For events on location, it's ideally no more than a two-man job for interviews and content we can postproduce. We are building out a network around the world to cut down on time and travel costs too, however, we keep the production standards controlled and centralised. This is important for our brand. It has to be a good-quality viewing experience."
Typically, the video news items are shot direct to Adobe's OnLocation software, which comes with Premiere Pro CS5. It allows Oliveira to shoot direct to disc-in his case, to a Terrastore connected to his Mac-and this allows him to shoot about 24 hours of footage at DVCam quality, which is more than enough for his team to compile even relatively lengthy items without needing to manage dozens of tapes and loosely coupled metadata. OnLocation allows the team to draft out a script or storyboard on the software's timeline in advance, and then team members pretty much just fill in the sections by selecting the stage of the script they are filming, pointing the camera and pressing record. If they want to reshoot, they can just click on the timeline and add a new take. It allows Oliveira to create tight program-format templates and maintain a consistent production standard.
Once they have completed the shoot, they pass the content and edit decision list (EDL) to Final Cut Pro for a cleanup and then export to an MPEG-2 mezzanine file.
This all allows the team to keep the amount of preparation time to a minimum, and it keeps their operating costs to an absolute minimum.
It also means that postproduction can be completed on-site or on the journey home.
Oliveira uses Ooyala's online video publishing (OVP) platform to publish the content. He gave me a tour of the process and it looks slick. Once he logs in to the back end/administration site, he has a range of publishing tools that provide him with WYSIWYG control of the look and feel of his player and syndication and also to introduce interstitials and preroll adverts.
The mezzanine MPEG-2 file is then uploaded and transcoded to the desired output format. Once the content is ready, Oliveira then has UI control to publish it as he needs to and the content goes live.
Ooyala's service, as with many of these OVPs, also offers detailed reporting and logging, which provides Oliveira with the insight as to what works and what doesn't as far as his end users are concerned.
Finally, he also showed me how he could simply turn on a live stream player on his site (through the Ooyala service) and, by entering some simple URL, username and password details into a copy of Flash Media Live Encoder, he could instantly publish live events online. This means that he can take two cameras, a small mixer and a mic and ultimately produce live ju-jitsu event coverage with a team of just two or three. Live interviews could, in theory, be done by just one person. It's true webcasting.
And that's exactly what he has been doing, with growing frequency and to ever-increasing audiences. Having initially streamed last autumn's World Championships from Barcelona to several thousand avid fans, the demand for his service is growing, and he is scheduling a much wider series of coverage this year. The costs are as low as possible and this means that not only can he operate within the tight budgets that the sponsors of a niche sport have, but he can reinvest in the model so it can scale up and deliver more and more events.
There have been so many entrants into this space over the years, many of whom set up without a clear focus on the content they wanted to produce and deliver, and with TV world budget ideas. They usually burn out quickly. That's not what streaming media is about for me: it's about democratising production and broadcast by lowering costs and working with lower production values-however, as Oliveira and Online Fight Channel prove, working within a confined budget doesn't mean the quality has to be poor.