By Carolyn Braff  

For sports fans whose Internet routines do not include a daily visit to ESPN.com, the sports network has come up with a simple solution – bring ESPN.com to the fans via a syndicated video player.  “We realized that there is value in reaching out to other areas where our consumers are,” explains Matt Murphy, SVP of digital video distribution at ESPN. “Research showed us that sports fans by habit often go to just a handful of sites, so our goal is to go out there and continue to reach the fans by syndicating our content outside of ESPN.com.” 

ESPN.com is using a syndicated video player to make its short-form online video content available directly through AOL Video and AOL Sports, marking the first time ESPN has syndicated its video content through an internet portal. 

“We are very selective in whom we enter partnerships with,” Murphy says, “but we are very optimistic that we will be doing more.” 

For now, ESPN is pushing about 70 clips a day to its AOL video player, offering game highlights, breaking news and clips from shows like SportsCenter Right Now, Mike and Mike in the Morning, Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn.  

By using an embedded player, ESPN is able to keep its branding consistent, even as fans navigate away from the ESPN homepage. 

“We’re very cognizant of what our fans expect from ESPN, therefore managing that experience that they have with our brand is important,” Murphy says. “We do that by using our player, not the player of our partners who may have different philosophies about how they want to represent content.” 

The embedded player also allows ESPN to keep tabs on the traffic generated through the video portal, reducing the fears of traffic reduction that can accompany a syndication model. In addition, by linking to ESPN.com content related to the video topics, ESPN hopes to push traffic back to its home site. 

“There was a lot of debate about whether we were going to be creating value only for our partner by bringing our content outside of ESPN.com,” Murphy says. “But we have become comfortable with it and because we can keep track of the traffic that we are getting, this will only make us stronger.” 

With the embedded player just two weeks old, it’s hard to make sense of the traffic data that ESPN has collected thus far, but previous streaming experiences with ABC.com do offer a point of comparison. 

“The contextual relevance of the content that we’re providing is making a difference,” Murphy says. “When people go to AOL they are going there for a lot of reasons, but when they go to the specific sports section, the video fits in very will with the stories that they are featuring. Our goal is to serve the fan and this is another way to do that, by reaching out to where they are on the Internet.”