XOS Digital Launches HS-, College-Sports Video-Syndication Platform

By Carolyn Braff

XOS Digital debuted as a division of XOS Technologies just a week ago, but it’s already making big news in Lake Mary, FL. This week, XOS Digital has announced the launch of the first-ever digital sports-video-syndication platform, focused entirely on high school and college sports. For sports marketers looking to reach fans of high school and college sports, this platform is a clear windfall.

“In representing rightsholders, we have relationships with a lot of different publishers that license content from us,” explains Rich Routman, SVP of business development for XOS Digital. “What we’re looking to do is build deeper relationships with each of our publisher partners, so we’re providing produced sports content to them. For advertisers looking to reach out to the sports demographic, we have the ability to package that content as a media product.”

XOS Digital is made up of two partner companies, XOS Technologies and Collegiate Images. CI has exclusive video- and image-content agreements with more than 100 partners — including colleges, universities, conferences, bowl organizers, and broadcasters — which give XOS Digital countless hours of video to serve as the basis of original content.

“We’ll take a concept, like the NFL draft, and create an original Web series surrounding it,” Routman explains. “We’ll then distribute that Web series across hundreds of sites that are specifically dedicated to sports, so that the marketer can have the best reach of an event or a concept with which they want to get deeper involved.”

Collegiate Images’ resource library gives XOS Digital plenty of content to work with, but, instead of just clipping highlight packages for use in the syndication player, the company is leveraging its production resources to produce original programming.

That original programming will function as branded content, because marketers have the opportunity to integrate their brand into such shows as The College Sports Minute, 119 Teams in 119 Days, Countdown to Signing Day, and Gridiron Draft 2009, all of which are produced at XOS Digital’s proprietary studio in Lake Mary. Every show can be customized by XOS Digital clients to integrate their branding with the content in new and creative ways.

“It’s really branded sports entertainment,” Routman says. “We can do preroll ads and traditional overlays, but the real opportunity for advertisers is to be inside of the programming so fans don’t have to actually watch the 15-second preroll, which makes for a better fan experience.”

The syndication platform puts content on any of the hundreds of Websites with which XOS Digital has relationships, including national-media sites that cover sports, local-newspaper sites, fan sites, and niche sites — anywhere and everywhere a fan would go to consume sports content.

“Our goal was to give marketers that are trying to reach sports fans the best reach possible,” Routman says. “It can become frustrating when you’re a sports marketer to have to go out and buy media on a ton of different sites. Now they can buy the entire sports audience through our sports-syndication platform, integrate within our programming, and be seen across all the sites that we do business with.”

The syndicated platform can work in conjunction with any video player and serves high school and college video content exclusively.