> Blog

BIRDI Livestreams the European Touch Junior Championships in France

August 28, 2019

After the successful live streaming of the Youth World Cup and World Cup games in Malaysia in May 2019, the Federation of International Touch (FIT) re-engaged BIRDI to assist with live streaming of the European Touch Junior Championships held in France to ensure supporters from across the globe could watch their teams compete.

FIT is the worldwide governing body for Touch Football and represents more than 50 individual nations. To give an indication of numbers there are over 679,000 participants in Australia alone.

At the recent 3-day European Touch Junior Championships we used BIRDI's stand-alone live stream product to deliver live video content, viewed across the world, for 8 hours a day. The process was simple and the lasting legacy created for the sport is priceless.

Problems FIT needed to solve

FIT were exploring these initial and ongoing key challenges:

  1. Potential revenue opportunities for the sport (through their youtube channel).
  2. Increasing engagement and participation with audiences across the world in Touch Football.
  3. Ensuring the safety of players, spectators and officials of any drone operations during competition by centralising the capturing of matches through the BIRDI platform.

FIT needed to address these localised challenges for the European Federation of Touch:

  1. User-friendly interface for organisers to reduce administrative overhead, and complexity of streaming many simultaneous matches.
  2. Ability to separate live streams into individual matches for greater engagement and user experience.
  3. Centralised system that automatically interacts with the central bodies (European Federation of Touch) match scheduling system.

FIT engaged with BIRDI, an Australian drone technology company, because the BIRDI's stand-alone live stream orchestration product provides sporting bodies and teams the ability to facilitate all of these aspects.

BIRDI's Solution

BIRDI's stand-alone live stream orchestration product provided the following  benefits: Administrator benefits:

  • Reduced administrative overhead & complexity of streaming many, simultaneous matches.
  • Reduced room for human error as it provides production room like overview of streams and stays in sync with changing match draw.
  • Simple and easy to use therefore no special training was required and the software was handed to the team in Paris and operated by first-time users.

FIT benefits:

  • Ability to stream an increased number of matches
  • Ability to plan ahead reliably which matches would be streamed so that players’ family and friends will not be disappointed
  • Ability to see viewer activity ie amount of views per stream

Audience benefits:

  • Ability to set up match notifications for matches of interest
  • Ability for coaches, players and viewers to easily look back and search for the exact match they want from a championship or league.

[/fusion_text][fusion_separator style_type="none" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id="" sep_color="" top_margin="8" bottom_margin="8" border_size="" icon="" icon_circle="" icon_circle_color="" width="" alignment="center" /][fusion_text columns="" column_min_width="" column_spacing="" rule_style="default" rule_size="" rule_color="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id=""]

Results

The use of the BIRDI's stand-alone live stream orchestration product was incredibly successful and allowed supporters in over 30 countries to view the matches.

  • Over 26,000 hours of viewing time
  • Over 26,000 individual views
  • Over 26 video streams
  • Average viewing time of 60 minutes per stream

Watch the Action

Did you miss the live action? View all the content from the 2019 European Touch Championships here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CxoRGr4H3c