Social Media and ‘Social Sport Media?’

The 3^rd edition of the Indian Premier League began on Friday 12^th March 2010, backed by a breakthrough deal between the league and Google-owned video site, YouTube. All 60 matches will be aired live worldwide for free on YouTube, while the IPL chairman Lalit Modi also took great delight in announcing that ITV would also be showing all matches live on UK television.

However, it’s the socially advanced way that these matches are being shown on YouTube that is really refreshing to see. A Twitter feed is embedded on the page so that tweeters can sign in and comment just below the live action, while viewers part of the ‘IPL Official Community’ can also post ‘Channel Comments’ on the same IPL YouTube Channel. I’ve taken the liberty of coining the phrase ‘Social Sport Media’ as the best way to explain this emerging phenomenon, and it would be interesting to see how successful this strategy proves to be for the IPL.

The facility of chatting online with others while watching sport is certainly nothing new however. Justin.tv is a vastly popular website which steams sport, movies, TV shows and other video content while allowing users to chat to other users on the same page with the video in sight. Justin.tv has been around for over 3 years but the quality of steams is inconsistent and certainly not as clear as the stream shown on YouTube for the IPL.

It will be interesting to see just how successful the ploy to stream the IPL on YouTube worldwide for free will be, especially considering that it was previously on Setanta’s pay-per-view channel for the past 2 years. This effort to maximize the exposure of the sport and brand and to make up for lost TV revenues by increasing advertising/marketing exposure during matches has been labeled as a gamble by some observers, but in my opinion it’s a bold and shrewd move by Lalit Modi in order to get as many people watching this up and coming version of an historic sport as possible.