The Challenge
Tennis Australia’s objectives heading into the 2023 Australian Open were to increase its reach and engagement with the tournament’s global audience, ensuring fans could access video, both live and on-demand, no matter where they were in the world.
To do this, Tennis Australia (TA) needed to capture and deliver as much of the Australian Open story as possible across its social and digital channels to supplement broadcast coverage. TA needed a solution to produce video content in real-time, from up to 33 courts, and optimize content output for every screen and platform.
The Solution
Grabyo Studio enabled Tennis Australia’s content team to publish clips from every court in real time, whilst recording every minute of live action in the cloud. The team had instant access to every moment, both on and off the court, whenever they wanted. This freedom allowed users to deliver a story for multiple audiences, while creating a more targeted and localized feel.
With teams across the globe, TA built a series of remote production workflows using Grabyo that were vital in executing its global strategy. Grabyo’s cloud-native technology means users from any location can access, edit and deliver content to multiple local channels, as if they were working in the same room.
TA also used Grabyo to restream its main broadcast feed to multiple digital channels, without the complexity and expense of encoding the feed multiple times or setting up multiple distribution points from individual hardware devices.
The Results
Tennis Australia’s clip creation and time to publish has been significantly reduced with Grabyo. In the past, its team would have to access video content through broadcast systems and traditional TV edit suites to reformat and optimize content for various social and digital channels. It could take its team up to an hour to publish a clip from the live footage. Using Grabyo, this can be done in real time, with clips published live on its social channels in seconds, optimized and formatted correctly for each platform. Working with Grabyo means that TA is first to market, with content from the Australian Open available in multiple destinations at the same time. This speed of publishing and focus on the end user makes TA’s social media accounts the primary destinations for content from the Australian Open.
During the 2022 tournament, Tennis Australia published more than 2200 clips to social media using Grabyo. This included clips and highlights from live matches on court, yet one of the most successful clips was of a ball boy trying to catch a moth on the court shown on YouTube shorts. This viral moment generated over 75 million views alone – highlighting the power of social distribution and how content beyond the live action can generate huge engagement and bring audiences closer to live events.
Grabyo enables Tennis Australia to capture the moments that matter; you can contact us here to learn more about Grabyo and its SaaS solutions for live video production in the cloud.
