The frenetic sport of handball has a massive European following, with the kind of support and television coverage that you would expect for a sport of its popularity and therein lies a problem… if you are a female player.
In common with many others among the world’s major sports, it’s the top men that get the TV coverage with the women playing second fiddle and, of course, this isn’t just a battle of the sexes – the lower leagues in any sport, so-called ‘minority’ sports and disability sports are all looking to build a fan base and get exposure for sponsors. If this is your problem too, how about taking a lead from the French Handball Federation (FFHB) and their top women’s league, the Ligue Féminine de Handball (LFH)?
The LFH harnesses Twitter and other social media superbly well and one of their central messages is pushing fans towards match video on the FFHB dartfish.tv channel. There, fans can search for their favorite team’s games…
…or, for those without the time and inclination to watch the entire match, the best bits have been identified in Dartfish software, tagged up, exported and turned into highlights movies. Video editing is so much more efficient when the content being used is well indexed in this way. In this video, you can see how actions of players have been identified.
A third approach, not yet used by Handball in fact, is to let fans discover their own highlights by uploading the entire game but marking up key moments. These are searchable and you can try that for yourself in the video, embedded from dartfish.tv below. Click on the marker browsing arrows on each side of the video and discover how each crucial detail in the game is labeled with data.
Better still, check out the same video on dartfish.tv where you can also experiment with filtering for the game events which interest you.
Video Management
Maintaining a database of every game across several leagues is made achievable for French Handball because they are able to devolve responsibility for content to the leagues and clubs themselves. Each League has a moderator responsible for managing content and each club has one or more people who have been given upload rights. They are creating their own team’s content, simply, by using Dartfish software and the Dartfish Note app to save spending hours after the game cutting it up in video editing software.
See it with an App!
FFHB also provide access to dartfish.tv content via their FHHB app (available from the App Store and Google Play). This is a shrewd move, recognizing that 50% of dartfish.tv viewers (July 2014 statistic) are watching from smart phones and tablets and that we find that App users will spend three times longer on a channel compared with those using a browser. Perhaps you can already understand the reasons for this if you consider your own favorite websites and how much more likely you are to visit them regularly if they are accessed via an app where one tap is all that is required to start browsing the latest news, tweets, weather, travel information…. or sport.
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