House of Highlights Brings Creator League Basketball, Dodgeball Live Events to Dream Con

The Bleacher Report vertical erected its own arena and live streamed broadcasts of both events

In today’s creator-driven media economy, sports content is bleeding across genres. Be it with film, gaming, or even global communities like anime, sports are finding captive audiences in some previously uncharted waters.

House of Highlights’ Creator League made a stop at the gaming and anime convention, Dream Con, this past weekend. The activation included live-streamed broadcasts of basketball and dodgeball events.

One of the digital media brands today that is best tapping into this blending of pop culture universes is House of Highlights. The team at HoH, a vertical of WBD Sports-owned Bleacher Report, was at it again this past weekend hosting and broadcasting two live sporting events with its popular Creator League at the gaming and anime convention Dream Con – which was hosted at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX.

B/R and House of Highlights built an arena with seating for 2,000 fans while also hosting a separate Watch Party room at the Convention Center for an additional 6,000+ spectators for a 5-on-5 basketball game on Friday night and a Dodgeball match on Saturday night.

While the media giant has played around in various flavors of live broadcast workflows – including some that utilize exclusively smartphones – HoH went full traditional live broadcast with classic camera positions and even a production truck on-site (Lyon Video).

House of Highlights erected a 2,000-seat arena at the Austin Convention Center to host its Creator League events at Dream Con 2023. (Photo Courtesy of House of Highlights)

According to Gilbert, six cameras were deployed in the arena, including a traditional Steadicam, as well as a camera on a DJI Ronin gimbal that was free to roam onto the playing surface. There was also a couple of robotic cameras. For basketball, those were affixed to the backboards.

“We’re trying to blend what fans are expecting to see with a high-production basketball game with what we know resonates on social,” says Sam Gilbert, Director, Content for House of Highlights, and Executive Producer on this event. “We’re willing to take risks and we can take those risks to hopefully reap the rewards. There’s no real downside for us to test some of those things.”

HoH had between 40 and 50 crew members on site making the event possible, with both live events spearheaded creatively Gilbert, as well as producer Katie Thorpe and director Jamie Kiley. Key behind-the-scenes leadership came from Production Manager Myriam Wilson and Technical Operations Manager Alex McKeen.

Bleacher Report and House of Highlights have been working closely with the founders of Dream Con – a group of social media influencers called RDCWorld – for nearly five years and when the opportunity became available to host an event with the Creator League last year (when the event was in Dallas), the HoH team jumped at the opportunity to inject their flavor of live sports into the celebration.

“We’d been in conversations with them for a while about this,” said Gilbert, “and realized we could provide some real value here, bringing in the third passion point here, which is sports. Last year. we saw a lot of really strong results and it was a huge success. So we thought why not bring it back and make it even bigger?”

Live coverage of both events were streamed to YouTube, as well as within the BR App, on HoH social channels (TikTok and YouTube), and across a lineup of ‘official creator co-streamers’ channels, like RDC, Jidion, MMG, and Marcelas Howard. The Dodgeball event will also received a linear television rebroadcast when it will re-air as an hour block on TBS on Monday, August 8.

In addition to the live broadcasts, House of Highlights naturally created and distributed a wealth of social content for platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, and others.