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CASE STUDY

How Discovery+ generated over 400 million views for its Tokyo 2020 Olympics coverage with Wildmoka

Customer - Discovery+ (1)

Maximizing reach for a world-wide audience

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. 

Industry

Olympic Games

Goal

Simplify the process of publishing video online 

Result

10K videos published, generating over 400M views

The Situation

An event of unparalleled complexity

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”. 

The Solution

A single production hub for all Discovery+ Eurosport content

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. 

The Result

“Without a doubt, Wildmoka delivered.”

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. 

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Using Wildmoka meant that:

  • 300 remote editors in 14 countries could be trained in just a few weeks.
  • Over 10,000 short-form videos were published on social media, generating more than 400 million views (in addition to content on their OTT and partner networks).
  • The broadcaster was able to distribute video to all desired endpoints.
  • Content was localized and metadata applied.

“What we don’t want to do is have seven different workflows delivering that content; we want one workflow that delivers to all those endpoints. And that’s what we were able to achieve with Wildmoka”  

– Robert Hodges, Director of Audience and Content Strategy at Discovery. 

Watch the video to learn more about how Discovery Plus Sport used Wildmoka at the 2020 Olympic Games

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