Australia’s fast-action bowls tournament created live social video highlight clips to help attract a new, younger audience to bowls.
The Bowls Premier League (BPL), held in Moama, New South Wales, Australia last month, used cloud-based live video production platform Grabyo to create, edit and deliver real-time social video highlights.
The highlight clips were used to complement the live broadcast on Fox Sports Australia and Sky Sport NZ, with the bowls footage reaching a total audience of 3.5 million worldwide.
The BPL is a made-for-television event created to change viewer’s perception of bowls. The BPL website describes it as the “20/20 of bowls. It’s fast, it’s loud, it attracts the world’s best bowlers and it appeals to non-bowlers who once upon a time may have seen bowls in a different light.”
The real-time highlight clipping is part of the sport’s drive to reach a new audience. The near-live highlights and short recap videos were available to fans on any device across the governing body Bowls Australia’s social and digital platforms.
The clips were created using a modest setup – the cloud-based Grabyo, a laptop, a web-browser and internet connection.
Bowls Australia communications and marketing manager Aidan Davis, said: “BPL11 [this year’s event] was a huge success and delivered some of the best moments the sport has seen. Grabyo enabled us to bring fans across Australia and the rest of the world to the green so our amazing team could share the excitement with them. Our overall aim is to share this great sport with as many people as possible and the reaction to our content was extremely well-received.”