Discovery+ Eurosport is one of the world’s leading sports broadcasters. During the Tokyo 2020 Olympic games (taking place in the summer of 2021 due to the pandemic), Discovery+ began using Wildmoka’s Digital Media Factory to distribute content to all their endpoints so as to maximize their reach over the 2.5-week tournament.
Olympic Games
Simplify the process of publishing video online
10K videos published, generating over 400M views
The Olympics is the most complicated event to broadcast in the world. Over the course of two and a half weeks, thousands of individual contests take place. With over 3,500 hours of live coverage (plus analysis, interviews, and highlights programs), getting video of all matches, races, and performances into a linear schedule is challenging enough. And for Discovery+ Eurosport, the work is especially challenging because the content is distributed to 50 markets in 19 different languages.
Moreover, Discovery+ had an ambitious strategy to address today’s fragmented media market, by publishing content where their audiences are. They wanted to distribute live streams, clips, and highlights via their OTT, to third-party platforms, and all major social media. However, doing this would be very technically challenging.
Robert Hodges, Director of Audience and Content Strategy at Discovery explains more: “What we didn’t want to do was to take all of that content, and all of those feeds and deliver it to a different platform which created its own complexities and potential pinch points for things to go wrong when we already have that in place. What we were looking for was a tool that we could layer over the top of our global video platform”.
Discovery+ began working with Wildmoka in early 2021. They were specifically looking for technology that could layer over the top of their own video platform. “I’m a content person” says Robert, “I just want to get all this content from A to B in the simplest way I can, in all different aspect ratios, to all the different platforms and endpoints.”
Wildmoka delivered exactly that. Discovery+ could connect their own video platform to Wildmoka which ingested live streams from the games. Discovery+ then trained their editors and partners to use the platform to edit video and distribute it. From a single place, editors could select any feed in any language, clip it, make simple edits, and then publish it in the correct format for their audiences.
Using Wildmoka contributed to Discovery+ having “extremely successful games,” Robert believes. It was easy to distribute video from the Tokyo Olympics to all social media, to the Discovery+ OTT platforms, and third-party networks around Europe. Despite the enormous amount of content produced, they had no technical issues with Wildmoka, and Robert found they utilized the platform more than they’d originally envisaged.