Is channel surfing the future of sports media?

How did Overtime’s basketball league, OTE, progress in three seasons from a few thousand people watching, to hundreds of thousands of people watching concurrently and over a million people tuning in for part of our championship finals? The answer is - back to the future. Remember channel surfing (you of a certain age). Sit on the couch, take out the remote and flip through the channels until you find something to watch. Maybe a random sports match, a game show or documentary. Before social media it’s how we watched and discovered, especially with the explosion of cable channels in the 90’s and beyond.

That behavior is dead on linear television. Instead we scan the Netflix or the Amazon Prime Video home page for recommendations. And instead we vertically scroll social media. Finding what to watch is different - cover images and recommendations instead of serendipity or a text based TV guide - and for sports, it’s appointment viewing. Come watch this game at this time at this channel.

The hard part in this process is that we’ve largely done away with live sports discovery. Sure if you are over 50, and still subscribe to cable, you might turn on the television and get sucked into a random game (or be at the gym and watch a random game or match that’s on). But in general we watch sports with intentionality. Which means as a new team, or league, or sport, growth and discovery is ten times harder than it’s ever been in the past.

You have to DECIDE to watch something. You don’t DISCOVER it.

At Overtime a segment of our games are on Amazon Prime Video. They are an amazing partner and are the most widely available streaming platform. Amazon Prime Video is also where we have a non-scripted show, One Shot, that sits side by side with the game, and is thus a hugely valuable partnership for our basketball league, Overtime Elite. But how do we grow that audience? Both for our business and for our partnership with Amazon.

This season, which concludes mid March, we took the games that we self distribute and are not part of our Amazon partnership and we decided to embrace channel surfing. Or I should say, we distributed in a way that tapped into the original mojo of channel surfing and allowed us to widen the top of the funnel for discovery of our league.

Every self distributed game was available on 10 - 15 social platforms, live. So a City Reapers vs RWE game that was separate from our Prime Video distribution might be available LIVE on:

Overtime Instagram

OTE Instagram

City Reapers Instagram

RWEs Instagram

OTE Twitter

OTE Youtube

Overtime Tik Tok

OTE Tik Tok

City Reapers Tik Tok

RWE Tik Tok

All at the same time.

And that’s just to start. Add in players and partners social channels going live as well.

Open up any social platform, where we have collectively over 100 million followers and you might discover our game is live. This is the modern day channel surf. You didn’t know it was on, it was there, and you discover and tune in.

Now we have to keep you there which of course is a great game, with great talent and great announcing. It helped that the basketball Gods blessed us with several nail biting, down to the wire, championship games.

As a result of this strategy we had hundreds of thousands of people watching OTE games. Both over the course of the game and concurrent numbers. You read that correctly. And they were not watching for a few seconds. Average watch time was comparable with other professional sports leagues.

As far as I can see, we are the only professional sports league that self distributes across a high multiple of live social channels to drive top of the funnel discovery and engagement. Add to that tens of thousands of live comments, and I believe we have found a disruptive modern distribution strategy and a perfect compliment and eventual growth engine for our Amazon Prime Video distribution.

We started OTE and our three other sports leagues to make a longitudinal bet that just as we have been able to drive Gen Z and next generation audiences to watch video on social platforms, so could we start to do with live sports. Whether you call it a multi platform live social distribution, top of the funnel reach or just channel surfing, it’s been a massive success for us as we look to build the next generation of sports properties.