Sportsrocket Turbine Powers AFL Streaming

Service provides games, live look-ins, and real-time highlights to major social platforms

This weekend, with the launch of its 2017 season, the Arena Football League will join a growing number of professional sports organizations to use Sportsrocket to live-stream its games and provide fans real-time highlights.

Sportsrocket Turbine is the way sports-rights holders distribute and monetize video, and Turbine will make games, live look-ins, and real-time highlights available to fans nearly everywhere they consume video. The system is the first syndication technology to enable live simultaneous distribution to every major social platform within a native player.

Sportsrocket Turbine was successfully deployed last weekend (March 31-April 2), making its debut during the Formula Drift Streets of Long Beach event in Long Beach, CA. Live-stream views from this event were up 600% from the prior year, from 140,000 streams to nearly 1 million.

“Turbine was a tremendous success during its first engagement last weekend,” says Sportsrocket founder/CEO Brian Bedol. “It’s a powerful syndication tool created to address the challenge of reaching fans where they already consume content, rather than asking them to travel to a new destination. Sportsrocket changes the playing field, offering forward-thinking rightsholders like the AFL the ability to distribute easily, broadly, and profitably.”

Adds AFL Commissioner Scott Butera, “Everyone here is thrilled to be working with Sportsrocket as the 2017 AFL season gets under way on Friday. We examined the marketplace thoroughly and are confident that Sportsrocket’s innovative live-streaming solution is the best platform to help us grow our exciting sport’s fan base. Most important, they have a deep understanding of sports media, and we get the benefit of that experience.”

Sportsrocket provides a complete end-to-end media solution for leagues, teams, and rightsholders, alleviating the need for the big capital investment and dedicated staffing previously required.  Turbine doesn’t require a long-term contract and is integrated with Sportsrocket’s media operating system, which offers game and highlights management, multiplatform video-on-demand syndication, OTT distribution, and subscriber and advertising monetization. Turbine also enables live look-ins on social media if the game is streaming elsewhere, such as OTT or behind a pay wall.