| By: Carolyn Braff, Managing Editor | Published: August 25, 2009 |
Louisiana State University fans already know that LSUSports.net is a go-to destination for original video on LSU’s sports teams, but when the athletic department’s NeuLion-hosted Website unveils its latest redesign this fall, that original video will be featured like never before.
“We’re trying to enhance the fan experience overall,” says John Henry, director of client support for NeuLion. “We’re creating a much larger main-feature area, embedding video in those spots so that college partners can really start getting their video out to users.”
Elsewhere in the Southeastern Conference, Mississippi State University is working to increase the amount of video its athletic department produces. NeuLion is relaunching the Bulldogs’ site, and, for an athletic department without a strong video presence, the redesign will help the electronic media coordinator pitch to his superiors the importance of creating more video content.
“Some schools are utilizing this technology to help their Web guy push video internally,” Henry says. “They’re going to be able to do a lot more video going forward, because they have this player.”
Traditionally, he says, video content has been relegated to a side column on an athletic department’s home page or hidden behind a subscription wall. For NeuLion’s redesign of 14 school sites ranging from Arkansas to Virginia, the embedded video experience has been moved into the main-feature-story rotator, smack in the center of the landing page.
“We’re doing new video portals for all of these 14 schools, and that portal is a TV-like experience,” Henry says. “They can sit down and get their daily video, and it will play through the clips, so they don’t have to click through each individual clip to watch multiple videos. You can just pick a channel and then consume for an extended period of time.”
Following in the footsteps of NeuLion’s relaunches of sites like NHL.tv and IndyCar.com, these new college sites are designed to give an enhanced, TV-like video experience.
“If you’ve seen the NeuLion technology before, it will look similar, but it’s a whole new experience for the college side,” Henry says. “In the college business, we’ve been locked into a Windows Media environment. The focus here is to move people to a Flash experience, which inherently will improve the buffer experience. I think that we’ll see some of the things that the company is doing in the professional space start pushing into the college space.”
Those things include adaptive streaming, HD-quality video, and formats that move beyond the traditional Windows Media environment.
“We’re trying to open up the avenues for our partners to produce videos in other formats that we can support and get out there,” Henry explains. “Whether that’s Silverlight, H.264, HD — we’re trying to find the best way for each particular partner to get video, produce video, and get it out there to their fans.”
Although subscription-based content still has a place on many athletic department Websites, Henry says, subscription products now revolve primarily around live-game experiences. A proliferation of low-cost, easy-to-use cameras that quickly produce high-quality video means that short-form content is changing from a quick news story to a quick video interview — and schools are taking advantage.
“There’s so much content that traditionally was just an article and you would read the coach’s quotes,” he says. “Now, whether it’s the Web person or an intern, you can record [the head football coach] doing a quick standup outside the locker room after a practice or scrimmage and easily get that on the Website. We’re trying to help our clients get more of that short-form content on the Web to enhance that fan experience.”
In addition to the newly highlighted Web portal, the redesigns incorporate new features like a live-stats application and integration with iPhones and set-top boxes. A cleaner front page and easier navigation also help enhance the fan experience.
The 14 athletic departments for which NeuLion is unveiling redesigned Websites this fall are Arkansas, Duke, Georgia, Iowa State, Kansas State, LSU, Minnesota, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Nebraska, NC State, Ohio State, Oregon, and Virginia.
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