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WTA Media Case Study | A Success Story in Media Transformation

Date: July 9, 2019

Introduction

WTA Media is a partnership between the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and global sports media company, DAZN. WTA Media acts as the central, global hub for media rights for the WTA’s 47 premier and international level tournaments.

WTA Media supports broadcast partners by providing a range of content that can be used alongside the live feeds from WTA events. This includes the latest idents, player profiles, interviews and more, which enable partners to create feature-rich, high-quality programming in their territories.

With such a wide range of broadcast-ready content available, and the high volume of requests from partners, WTA Media needed an intuitive new platform that could quickly scale to meet demand.

The opportunity

Due to the fast-moving nature of women’s tennis tournaments, WTA Media’s clients were often in a hurry to source content to react to events as they evolved in real time. In the existing system, assets were stored on a server in layers of sub-folders, which made it difficult to source relevant assets quickly enough to meet the requirements of the client.

Since it was difficult to predict in advance what each partner would need ahead of their transmission, this often led to missed opportunities, and a poor client experience. Furthermore, an FTP server was used to deliver assets to clients, which was slow and unintuitive.

As such, a key priority for any new platform was an effective search function and the ability to group content into logical collections. And it was also important for clients to be able to use the platform directly, without having to rely on WTA staff to find assets, which may introduce further delay due to office hours and staff availability.

Finally, improving the quality of the experience was paramount, so that clients would see WTA Media as premium, value-add service provider they are happy to do business with.

The solution

Using the Imagen platform, WTA Media has been able to consolidate its entire library into a single, cloud- accessible platform, enabling broadcast partners to search directly for the assets they need. With detailed metadata tagging, search is fast and intuitive, but WTA Media is also able to curate collections of content so that broadcast partners can easily find programming, interviews, idents and more.

The speed, simplicity and accuracy of the new platform means that it acts as a ‘near-live media centre’, containing content relating to current and upcoming tournaments. And it also means that broadcast partners can quickly and directly search for and download content to react to events as they evolve. This is aided by Imagen’s Accelerated File Delivery feature, which can download very large files at the fastest speeds.

“Due to the fast-pace of WTA event broadcasting, speed of delivery is a crucial element to the success of our business,” said Louise Lawler of WTA Media. “Imagen has helped to build our perfect workflow, enabling broadcast partners to source the content they need in the fastest possible time.”

As an added advantage, WTA Media is able to use Imagen’s powerful analytics tools to learn the types of content that partners download the most. This helps to inform future investment in new content, helping to maximise profitability. New content can also easily be added to the platform, even while on tour, without any technical expertise required on behalf of the uploader. This was not feasible with the old FTP-based system.

The response from WTA Media’s clients has been extremely positive. Broadcast partners now receive a first-class experience through a branded portal that perfectly meets their needs. With subscriptions to the WTA OTT platform doubling, year-on-year, WTA Media are seeing increasing demand from broadcasters looking to buy rights for the tournaments.

The Imagen platform has allowed WTA Media to scale its operations to meet this demand, while providing more choice and a better service too.

Key Features

  • Broadcasters can help themselves to content
  • Enables new content to be uploaded while on tour
  • Analytics to help inform future content
  • Content consolidated into one single platform
  • Partners able to search content directly
  • Fast downloads of high-resolution files
  • Can curate collections of content

"Imagen has helped to build our perfect workflow, enabling broadcast partners to source the content they need in the fastest possible time."

Louise Lawler, WTA Media

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