Grabyo’s new report explores how UFC pivoted its social content strategy to thrive during 2020.
While 2020 was a challenging year for live sport, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) reacted quickly to a reshaped production environment, adapting its workflows in order to continue delivering for its fans.
As stay-at-home measures have locked many out of production studios, and with only essential personnel on-site for events, UFC has leveraged its long-term partnership with Grabyo to bolster its remote production capabilities.
Grabyo’s new report explores how UFC was able to produce real-time highlights, video clips and live broadcasts for its global audience entirely in the cloud.
Here are some of the highlights – click here to view the full report.
Global to Local
Growing a global fanbase takes time and a continued focus on the needs of each local fanbase. With an established presence in markets across the world, UFC cannot afford to drop the quantity or quality of the content it produces for each territory.
However, using traditional broadcast hardware or software, delivering content to multiple destinations in multiple languages is laborious, time-consuming and expensive.
Using Grabyo Studio, Grabyo’s real-time clipping, editing and publishing service, UFC is able to streamline this process and ensure it is first to market with content across multiple regions simultaneously.
Grabyo enables the rapid sharing and redistribution of customized content within a single, distributed workflow. The UFC content and production teams can collaborate remotely from anywhere in the world.
Live innovation
When social distancing measures were put in place across the world, UFC needed to adapt quickly to deliver the raw, unfiltered content fans had come to expect.
UFC launched a new live Facebook show, Quick Hits, to give fans access to fighters in short interview segments, broadcast live during headline events.
UFC has broadcast 20 Quick Hits shows to date, achieving 72.5M video views, and within that, 26.7M minutes of video has been watched. Quick Hits posts have hit over 121M impressions.
In order to deliver Quick Hits with minimal crew and equipment, UFC used Grabyo Producer and Grabyo’s integration with LiveU to broadcast high-quality video directly to Facebook Live.
The workflow was able to facilitate social distancing, while the presenter and talent could discuss the fights and interact in real-time. UFC has evolved this workflow to include high-grade cameras and Grabyo’s remote contribution features to bring in remote guests for various segments of the shows.
“UFC makes it a priority to produce high-quality content across all our digital media platforms. It is one of the primary ways UFC stays connected to a global fan base of more than 300 million. Grabyo plays a key part by helping us maintain an efficient workflow and content delivery system. With the tools provided by Grabyo, our digital team is more agile and flexible than ever, ready to deliver the best content to our fans, 24/7.”
David Shaw, SVP, International & Content, UFC
Read the full report here.
