David Farnor | On 21, Sep 2014

As the new Premier League season continues, Vines of goals and other footy highlights continue to spread across the web – something, you may recall, the Premier League (and its commercial partner for online highlights, The Sun) were none too happy about. As part of our discussion on the matter, we looked for alternative methods for the Premier League and The Sun to share video clips in real-time through social media. The biggest player? Grabyo, a cloud-based platform that teamed up with The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) to provide Wimbledon videos in July. Now, the company has released its statistics for the Wimbledon campaign – its biggest sports partnership to date in its young history – and they make for interesting reading.

The AELTC used three live feeds from Centre Court, No.1 Court and No.2 Court – all of which were integrated with Grabyo Studio – with a Wimbledon-branded video gallery created at clips.wimbledon.com to work across all devices and screen sizes. They uploaded more than 300 short clips across Facebook and Twitter during the two-week tournament.

The grand sum of clip plays? More than 3.5 million.

The website enjoyed 600,000 views of different clips, 16.4 per cent of its total views. 1.4 million (40.6 per cent) were on Twitter, while 1.5 million (42.9 per cent) were on Facebook.

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, with an organic reach of >3.7m on Facebook as well as 28k likes, comments or shares and more than 1 million impressions on Twitter, featuring in 660,250 tweets (peaking at 11,393 tweets per minute).

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

— Wimbledon (@Wimbledon) July 1, 2014

“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,” notes Grabyo. Indeed, where some publications (blogs or websites) might use Vines to accompany content where no other video footage is available, Grabyo’s service enables the legal and commercial usage of highlights.

Two-thirds (2.35m) of Wimbledon’s social clip views were across the desktop versus one third (1.2m) across mobile devices, which Grabyo attributes to the fact that the “majority of play takes place during office hours in Europe and much of North America”.

“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,” says 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,” adds Grabyo.

Of course, they are going to say that the best results achieved through a service such as theirs. But with the Premier League threatening a clamp-down on Vines and The Sun only seeming to tweet links to its own app to watch videos, as opposed to any sharable content, you wonder if the newspaper and football organisation are missing a trick, either through Grabyo or their own in-house equivalent.

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