The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), hosts of The Championships, streamed live audio coverage of matches to social media for the first time, registering almost 750,000 views and generating direct engagement with just under 60,000 fans.
The Wimbledon Radio Channel used Visual Radio, a new component of the browser-based production platform Grabyo to deliver the content to Facebook.
The Visual Radio system displays custom graphics and animations on an audio frame and enables radio distribution to Facebook, Twitter, Periscope and YouTube as well as websites and mobile apps. Viewers are then able to interact with other listeners through comments or posts, connecting the wider fanbase and community.
Using Facebook Live, The Championships’ viewers were able to listen to the ladies’ final between Serena Williams and Angelique Kerber, the men’s semi-final between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal and the men’s final between Novak Djokovic and Kevin Anderson. According to Grabyo, these live match streams received almost 60,000 comments, shares and reactions from fans, hosted on the Wimbledon Facebook page.
“The popularity of the Wimbledon Radio Channel across our Visual Radio broadcasts exceeded all expectations,” said Alexandra Willis, head of communications, Content & Digital, The AELTC. ”The Wimbledon Radio Channel performs incredibly strongly across Wimbledon.com and our official apps, and to be able to extend that audience is fantastic. 500,000 people alone listened to the Nadal-Djokovic semi-final which demonstrates our commitment to offering the best access for our fans to enjoy The Championships and engage with our content, and we believe the response shows we have achieved this.”
Visual Radio from Grabyo enables production teams to manage multiple live audio streams collaboratively in the cloud, publishing directly to social and mobile platforms that do not offer options for radio broadcasting.
In addition, Grabyo says Visual Radio now offers the added option of activating campaigns for sponsors and media partners. Grabyo’s Producer platform allows users to insert branded graphics, animations or visualizations into the stream. Editors can also insert crowd-sourced comments, conduct live polls with fans and layer imagery and data within the frame to deliver a highly engaging experience for listeners.
