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MillimeterStreaming to the Apple iPhone, Part 2
Dec 8, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Turner Sports used HTTP Live Streaming to stream coverage of the 2009 PGA Championship for iPhone users.
Turner Broadcasting—PGA Championship
One of the first high-profile streaming applications for the iPhone was the 2009 PGA Championship, which was produced by Turner Sports two months after Apple released the HTTP Live Streaming technology. I spoke with Peter Scott, executive director of digital partnerships for Turner Sports, about the program.
Strategically, Scott says that Turner had initially turned to streaming video in the early 2000s as advertisers started reallocating advertising dollars from TV to the Web. Turner's web success convinced content owners such as NASCAR to approach Turner to run their online video sites, which Turner has done for several years. Turner also manages the PGA.com site in conjunction with the PGA, which is where viewers accessed the online/iPhone content from the PGA Championship.
Turner wanted to get ahead of the projected trend of advertising dollars moving to mobile applications by serving video to those platforms. Turner Sports first streamed a live feed to the iPhone from the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in July 2009, before the availability of HTTP Live Streaming from Apple. Specifically, Turner partnered with several smaller companies to produce a Windows Media Video stream that played live on the iPhone.
When planning for the PGA Championship in August, Turner wanted to use Apple's new technology, and unlike the iPhone broadcasts from the Masters Tournament and U.S. Open Championship, wanted to charge for the application. From a rights perspective, Turner's web and iPhone coverage was ancillary to the main CBS broadcast. To shoot the video, Turner sent its own camera crews to cover the event. The crews followed two groups around the course, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. One group always included Tiger Woods, while viewers voted to determine which other group Turner followed.
Turner charged $1.99 for the iPhone package, for which viewers got a constantly updated leaderboard and other stats, unlimited viewing of the Turner video feeds, access to video highlights, and the ability to set configurable alerts for each player. For example, if you're a Phil Mickelson fan (guilty as charged) you could configure an alert for each time he birdied (yeah!) or bogeyed (sigh!) a hole. Viewers who didn't want to pay the $1.99 could access a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) site with leader boards and other data, but no alerts or video.
Scott says the typical viewer was a spouse on a "honey do" mission to the grocery store or similar destination who wanted to stay updated on scores. He says that viewing was complementary to the TV and web feeds because few users who could watch on their TVs or computers would watch on their iPhones.
Turner doesn't release iPhone-specific numbers, but overall coverage numbers were impressive. For example, PGA.com's four days of coverage of the PGA Championship set a record of 206 million total page views, a 68 percent increase from 2008. In addition, nearly 5.7 million video streams were served during the third quarter on PGA.com, a 176 percent increase.
Table 1. Turner Sports' settings for its three quality levels.
From a technology perspective, Turner encoded the satellite feed from the event using Spinnaker 7000 encoders from Inlet and distributed the streams via content delivery network Akamai. Double Encore, a Denver-based mobile software development company, built the iPhone application. Turner distributed via adaptive bit rate streaming, producing and adaptively serving the three streams in Table 1.
Scott is bullish on Apple's HTTP technology, and he says he hopes the mobile market coalesces around that standard. Today, however, those seeking to access the three main markets—iPhone, Blackberry, and Android—have to develop custom applications for each. In that vein, Turner recently released 30 NBA team applications—one for each team—that are now for sale in the iTunes store, Blackberry App World, and Google Market, all for $3.99.
Scott has some advice for people considering streaming to the iPhone. "Find good technology partners, and get insights from companies who have done it before," he says. "Know what your viewers want to see. The most successful content for us has 'snackability,' so it's short and sweet, and holds the viewer over until they can watch on their computer or TV set."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.