This summer Grabyo managed its biggest real-time sports partnership to date when we worked with The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) for Wimbledon. The Wimbledon championship is the longest-running and most prestigious tennis tournament, attracting a billion-viewer global television audience and a 3.5m strong social following across Facebook and Twitter. This year, for the first time, AELTC partnered with Grabyo to enhance its social proposition with short clip video highlights.

The AELTC utilised three live feeds from Centre Court, No.1 Court and No.2 Court – all of which were integrated with Grabyo Studio, our cloud-based real-time video platform, and we created a Wimbledon-branded video gallery at clips.wimbledon.com designed to work across all devices and screen sizes.

The ease with which Grabyo Studio allowed us to create social videos as part of our content offering and distribute them to our global digital audience was very impressive,” (Alexandra Willis, Content and Communications Manager, AELTC)

The Results

The AELTC shared more than 300 short clips across Facebook and Twitter during the tournament, generating over 3.5m clip plays using Grabyo’s video platform:

• Facebook saw the largest number of Wimbledon clip plays with over 1.5m views (42.9%)
• 1.4m (40.6%) were on Twitter
• 600k (16.4%) were viewed within the video gallery powered by Grabyo.

The most viewed clip of the tournament, which featured Nick Kyrgios hitting a ‘tweener’ winner during his match against Rafa Nadal, generated over 450k clip views alone. The clip spread virally across social media with:

• Facebook: organic reach of >3.7m on Facebook as well as 28k likes, comments or shares.
• Twitter it enjoyed more than 1m impressions and 27k engagements – the match also generated an impressive 660,250 tweets peaking at 11,393 tweets per minute.
• Wimbledon also benefited from the speed of sharing via Grabyo as their own clip was picked up by popular online sports destinations such as Sports Illustrated and ATP World Tour.

WATCH: Shot of the.. tournament? year? @NickKyrgios hits a “tweener” winner. #Wimbledon http://t.co/12W675AcUY

— Wimbledon (@Wimbledon) July 1, 2014

The moment Novak Djokovic celebrated winning the tournament by eating grass on Centre Court also generated very significant engagement with almost 300k clip views, organic reach of 6.4m fans and 90k likes, comments or shares on Facebook. It also clocked up 190k impressions and >7.3k engagements on Twitter.

Despite Grabyo’s real-time video offering being a mobile-first format, two-thirds (2.35m) of Wimbledon’s social clip views were across the desktop versus one third (1.2m) across mobile devices – possibly due to the fact that the majority of play takes place during office hours in Europe and much of North America. iPhone was the dominant mobile device (as is common with mobile video consumption patterns) with 700k views versus 480k on Android.

The Future

“We were very pleased with the outcome of this initiative, which proved the value of being able to produce content quickly in response to real-time events. The clips drove an impressive level of organic social media engagement and buzz, while also encouraging Wimbledon fans to tune-in, and also providing us with content for the rest of our digital channels. There is clearly enormous potential to take this type of content further in partnership with our broadcast partners but we were delighted with the results in our first year of working with Grabyo.” (Alexandra Willis, Content and Communications Manager, AELTC.)

We are excited about the future of real time video for sports. The significant level of engagement across both Facebook and Twitter demonstrates the opportunity for rights holders across the social space and supports our view that the best results are driven by a cross-platform approach to real-time video distribution.