YES Network App Logs Record Usership With New Expanded Pick-N-Play Live Interactivity, YES Rewards

Twice this season, YES App has set a record for most-streamed game in its history

We’re a month into the Major League Baseball season, and one of the early headlines has been the return to form of the New York Yankees. The buzz around the Bronx Bombers has led to a red-hot start for its regional broadcast partner, YES Network.

A slew of new interactive features and services, not to mention winning, have the YES App smashing usership records over the first few weeks of the 2024 Yankees campaign. On two occasions already, the app has logged its highest concurrent peak viewership for a single game: on both Opening Day and the fourth game of the season (the final game of a four-game season-opening series with the Houston Astros).

“We had anticipated a strong start based on the hype around Spring Training,” says Matt Duarte, VP, strategy and business development, YES Network, “but it was a nice surprise that we not only set the record on Opening Day but came back and broke the record again that following Sunday. I think that shows the demand for the product on the field and how compelling these guys are this year. Hopefully, for us, fans enjoy watching it on our experience. Our production team and our digital team have done a good job capitalizing on close games [through notifications]. That drives a ton of traffic, and we see it.”

The YES App opened the 2024 New York Yankees season with an expanded Pick-N-Play Live game, which is integrated directly into the live-streaming experience on mobile devices, tablets, and the web. (Images: YES Network)

According to YES Network, viewers are watching games longer on the app this season — by a significant margin: average watch time per user per game is 78% longer than for the first 25 games of 2023.

Fans watching Yankees games in the YES App have noticed that the network has continued to expand its already robust offering of interactive games, live-stats overlays, and the industry’s first app-based loyalty rewards program.

Gamification Drives Interactivity, Rewards Loyalty

In YES Network’s Pick-N-Play Live game, users can answer trivia questions and much more within the same streaming environment where they are watching the live game. Powered by Kero Sports, the free-to-play, real-time Live, which launched in 2022 on the YES App, now features what the network is calling “dynamic questions”: the trivia and prediction-based questions are fully within the storytelling context of the game.

For the first time, a chat feature has been added to allow YES App users to discuss the game with fellow fans while watching.

During the game, users accumulate YES Coins, which are converted to YES Rewards points and redeemed for gift cards to such brands as Amazon, Uber Eats, Lowe’s, Ulta Beauty, Dunkin’, DoorDash, GrubHub, Wayfair, Adidas, and Buffalo Wild Wings.

“We are creating that connective tissue around all the different features that we offer,” says Duarte, adding that, on Pick-N-Play Live, “we’ve refreshed basically what that experience is like to make it more proactive and open to more fans as opposed to last year, when you had to seek and choose what you think is going to happen.”

The YES development team – which includes Senior Manager, Strategy & Business Development Jonathan Zarrilli, Product Manager, YES App Trent Shillingford, and Data Insights Analyst Antonio Parada – has added a chat feature to Pick-N-Play Live. It has helped drive the feature’s highest number of users ever for a single game this season while quadrupling the average players per game versus the same stretch from the 2023 season.

Additionally, YES Rewards thanks users who serve as the product’s best advocates. New in 2024, YES App users can receive up to 100,000 YES Rewards points for referring friends and family to buy a YES App standalone subscription. Anyone who refers a friend receives a unique code that, when redeemed, earns points applicable at the new YES Rewards Store, where they can buy YES-branded Yankees merchandise.

All these new layers and synergies required hard work with vendor partners like LiveLike and subscription/profile-management service Evergent. Additionally, Stellar Elements supports UI in the app experience, helping create checks and balances and accuracy of the user experience on the backend.

Increased Usership, Migration to Connected Devices Keep Focus on Image Quality

Another emerging trend in the live streaming of sports these days is the proliferation of connected devices and the migration of streaming audiences to the big screen in their homes.

The YES App entered the 2024 Yankees season with launches on LG Smart TV and Vizio Smart TV. It has been available on Amazon Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, Google TV, and Samsung Smart TVs as well.

Although most of the interactivity features launched this season are aimed at mobile, web, and tablets, the YES team regularly thinks about how these features can soon migrate to a connected TV environment

WATCH: YES Network’s VP, Strategy and Business Development Matt Duarte spoke about the YES App at the SVG Digital Engagement Forum in March during a panel titled “Sports My Way: Data, Interactivity, and Personalization in Live Streaming”.

“We understand that the number of people watching through the app on those big screens is growing,” says Duarte. “We want to tailor that experience as much as we can to them. When we talk about time spent going up, a lot of that is people moving to connected devices. The more people are subscribing directly to us, the more we see that they want to watch the biggest, best screen they can.”

Connected devices are an interesting area for sports broadcasters. Television sets require high-level image quality but offer fewer opportunities for interactive experiences that aren’t clunky. Additionally, big-screen viewers might simply be more inclined to want a lean-back experience or wish for their interactivity to be more on a second screen, unlike their mobile counterparts who might generally be more interested in gamification and interactivity presented simultaneously in a streaming environment.

“When I talk about personalization and all of these features and elements,” says Duarte, “there are people who don’t want that. They just want to sit back and watch as well. I think having the ability to toggle on and off and not [being forced] to watch the game in a way that they don’t want to [makes it] their choice.”

Even with the cool bells and whistles, Duarte and his team know that, when it comes down to it, image quality and stream reliability are users’ chief desire. To ensure performance with increased usership, in the offseason, YES Network held weekly meetings with its video-vendor partners like Harmonic and Conviva to ensure that video health would remain strong even though more people than ever were watching on the app.

“We’ve tried to focus on the experience and the video quality, says Duarte, “making sure that the user gets that best-in-class experience first and then layering in these features and functions to provide a better experience and lengthen the time spent that the users can watch to personalize that experience for them. We increase the capacity on the backend to make sure we’re preparing for events that are much more streamed than last year. Basically, I told everyone to think about our highest-streamed game and plan for 50% higher than that. That’s the plan. If we get there, great, but we want to be prepared for records every day.”