Burghley Horse Trials – Landmark pay per view streaming
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006
The 2006 Burghley Horse Trials was broadcast live via a pay-per-view (PPV) webcast on the weekend of 9-10 September, generating over £14,000 ($26,000) in one day. The Trials encompass an annual three day event held at Burghley House near Stamford, Lincolnshire, England. After the Badminton Horse Trials, Burghley is generally considered the most prestigious event in the equestrian calendar, worldwide.
Access to the Burghley estate can be restrictive, and it is particularly hard of course for fans in Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand to attend the event. This year, with sponsorship from Land Rover, Burghley was broadcast live over the internet on a PPV basis to supplement a limited television highlights package broadcast only on free-to-air BBC to UK viewers.
Live webcast
This live web broadcast represented the first equestrian sports programme to exploit the capabilities of the internet and the broadband platform that now exists internationally.
Over 2,000 viewers from around the world logged in and watched footage from 10 in the morning (BST) until 5pm in the afternoon paying around £7.00 ($13.00) to view (including a repeat broadcast). Although this is not a huge number of viewers by traditional broadcast standards, a significant number of broadband customers viewed the event through their PCs and laptops and provided great feedback. As equestrian fan ‘Jenni from Hertfordshire’ in England said: “I watched the Cross Country on my laptop in the garden with friends while BBQing. What a lovely treat at the end of the summer! Looking forward to next year.”
Stream UK provided the internet broadcast service through its international infrastructure. Unlike the majority of streaming media companies, Stream UK has its own Content Delivery Network (CDN) which has a capacity to deliver to over 100,000 concurrent users. If demand increases over and above this, the CDN is totally scaleable through third party arrangements.
Production and downlink
The 24-camera production was mixed on location and produced by Television in Europe which organised the rights to broadcast the footage over the web. Television sent its output video feed up to a satellite link which was then ingested and then re-purposed for broadcasting over the internet by Stream UK at two separate satellite downlink locations.
The video feed was re-purposed – encoded – at different bitrates to cope with low and high broadband connections. These streams dynamically change as connection speeds fluctuate locally. The streams were also encrypted using Digital Rights Management (DRM) software which ensures that the stream cannot be shared without payments being made.
Geo-targeting
For any PPV broadcast, rights management is essential. Stream UK has developed a complete geo-targeting system which allows users to be identified by country. The geo-targeting was particularly useful for restricting the access for viewers in the UK where the content was being broadcast live on the BBC only on the third and final day.
Success!
Undoubtedly, the live broadcast was a success and is set to become a regular service offered each year at Burghley and at other events in the equestrian calendar. The event represents an excellent example of how streaming media across the internet is providing a great mechanism for delivering content to niche communities, distributed internationally.
This so-called long-tail delivery is rapidly proving to be the best way of generating revenue from delivering media on the internet. Special-interest groups are willing to pay for good quality content in their particular areas, with traditional broadcasters better suited to satisfying the masses. One key advantage to the internet is the interactivity which can create genuinely involved online communities.
Improvements
From a marketing perspective, the number of subscriptions could have been increased through an enhanced marketing campaign as many people were unaware that the footage was being broadcast. This is particularly relevant for the international community who were only made aware of the broadcast through online marketing activities.
Whilst online activities are invaluable and very cost effective, they must be used in combination with traditional offline activities, particularly with respect to the equestrian demographic who are not heavy internet users (typically female, middle aged).
An attempt was made to encourage earlier subscriptions through an ‘early’ bird discount, but this failed to entice any significant numbers. This was probably a result of the fact that the discount was minimal (£6.50 versus £7.50).
In contrast, there was a late surge to subscribe as word got out and hundreds of subscriptions were taken in a matter of minutes before the event. Subscriptions could have also been improved further by making everyone at the event aware that the footage was being re-broadcast later that evening.
From a technical perspective the user experience could have been enhanced for around 5% of subscribers through a better-designed pre-event testing procedure. With any live streaming event there are always a small percentage of viewers who have problems viewing the stream. These problems are local to their computer and their specific set-up and they can result from security settings in their browser; firewalls; their connection to the internet; and the media player they are viewing the content on, among others.
The testing pages put online prior to the event did not accurately mimic the DRM licence delivery and this caused problems with some legacy systems on the day. With the surge of subscriptions late in the day combined with a particularly demanding demographic with high expectations the technical support telephone line was inundated with approximately 80-100 calls, which was well above the allocated capacity (four people manning e-mail and telephone enquiries).
The diagnostic process if viewers are experiencing problems can be a laborious and time consuming one involving restarting the computer, downloading updates or software and changing various settings. This is not ideal for a live event, particularly if the user is a die-hard fan and a ‘light’ computer user and wants to access the content, problem-free, there and then. Their instinct is of course to phone technical support immediately.
A revenue-generating business model
Most of the cost of setting up the web functionality was in developing and testing a complete system that combined massive capacity, DRM, geo-targeting and the acceptance of online payments. For future events these costs will be reduced.
The revenue from the event covered the outgoing costs, but of equal value is a database of satisfied subscribers with a high level of loyalty to specific content.
Key to the success of the event was the ability to deliver a satisfactory full-screen experience using the latest codecs at about 400 Kbps.
In conclusion, this was the first time an online PPV event had generated enough revenue to cover costs, in the author’s opinion. In view of the database of users generated and the capacity for ongoing revenue, the makings of a genuine business model have been established.
