Potential ways to improve interaction within your Sports OTT App
Sports are cool. They often keep you healthy, allow you to interact with cool people (until Covid happend, at least), and in general are just fun to play. But don’t you equally enjoy watching Sports? Many people do, so how do you get them to use your Sports App in a good way? How do you get them to interact more, share more, and watch more in general? In this blog I’ve taken the opportunity to look at some cool ways of increasing all that, and more.
GOAAALLLL!
Whenever I’m watching a live football match (I’ll admit, I’m not the biggest football fan), shortly after a goal you’ll always get bombared with highlights of that goal. And that’s fair, it is what the game is about after all. But what if I joined in later and didn’t see the goal yet, or what if I want to watch it when I want to? Normally you’d have to wait for the highlights to be published somewhere on the app or website, or potentially even find it somewhere on social media (outside of your app!). You see where I’m going with this already? Let’s take a look at this amazing piece of design that I created (I’m not a designer okay, sorry!):
So here I am, watching my live match and I want to look at when the goals happend. So I just click on the score in the top-left and get an overview with the goals that happend in the match. Clicking on the play button takes me to an overlay on top of the live stream (live stream for example gets paused, or muted at least), and I can immediately watch the highlight. Or share it to my social media of choice, or save it for later, to name a few other actions. Interaction with my app, check. Social media sharing, check. Awesome user experience, check. Happy user, happy us.
In all seriousness, this is a really easy way to increase interactivity. There will be some technical questions to answer, for example how easily you can publish your goal highlights, but that’s definitely solveable. The gain from a feature of this clearly shows itself, and allows you to gain a bigger and faster presence on social media. Next to that, users are clearly more engaged with your app other than just watching a live stream, so that’s a big win too.
You might ask yourself the question, how does this carry over to other sports? The obvious answer for most sports is simply: goals, goals, goals. But if you don’t have goals? In most cases there will be a point system, whether it’s fencing or rugby or some other sport, usually you can focus on important points being made. If that’s not the case? Use highlights! Who doesn’t like viewing the most amazing touchdown in rugby, or the most incredible recovery after being last in a race? The options are limitless, if you understand what the power is of the sports you offer, and what your users enjoy the most.
Offer choice: multiple angles
As much as highlights and goals are cool, if you show a shitty angle of the goal it’s not going to work. You might not expect it, but different users are interested in different things. The best example I can give here is actually a streamer/sport that has implemented this functionality in the recent past: Formula 1.
Maybe the race up front is incredibly boring, or you are only interested in a certain driver. Simply allowing users to switch their video feed to one of their choice, offers them so much more in terms of viewing experience. In most cases, you’re already recording the game or race with many camera’s at the same time already, and you have a person that’s constantly making the switch for the live feed between the interesting points of content. All the change you have to do is making those feeds available to users, and allowing them to switch. And maybe even allow them to watch multiple viewing points at the same time!
It’s a simple yet incredibly effective way to increase interactivity. Users like choice and control, and by doing this you’re giving them both.
Statistics statistics statistics
The keen eyes under us might have spotted something else already in the image shared above. Yes, on the left you see two viewing points from different drivers. But on the right? Statistics of the race that is currently happening. Whether it’s speed, time they have been driving, where they are on the racing track and of course their position. All of these topics are incredibly interesting and often not shared with the user, but why?
A big problem with live television and video content in general, is that you don’t have that much screen space available for statistics. You certainly don’t want to overcrowd the screen so that it takes away focus from the main content. That’s where the previous point we made comes into play. Now that you’ve enabled users to watch multiple viewing points at the same time, why not make a separate screen with just statistics? It’s yet another easy way to give the user more information about the sport they are watching, without taking any of the focus away from the main content. You’re simply offering users the choice to decide what they want to focus on.
TL;DR;
Giving your users the options to control what it is they are watching during live content, is a simple yet effective way to increase your users interaction with the app. It works incredibly well on multiple types of screens, whether it’s web, mobile or the big screen, on all types you can offer similar functionality. If you don’t want to give your users full control of what they are watching, or have a big focus on social media and highlights, the first option is definitely for you. Easily allow users to watch and share goal highlights with the click of a button makes for great interaction. Users happy, you happy.
