Introduction

The Auburn Tigers compete at the highest level of intercollegiate athletics as a charter member of the Southeastern Conference. Auburn fields 19 varsity teams with approximately 500 student-athletes supported by more than 200 full-time staff on the campus of Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama.

The problem

Auburn Athletics Department generate vast amounts of video across the college season. They produce the majority of this in-house through their own teams, creating game highlights, as well as interviews, press conferences and exclusive behind the scenes footage. One of the major challenges that they faced was delivering content to local news teams quickly and efficiently, as well as satisfying different media requests throughout the sport and athletics seasons.

“(With the old system) we couldn’t go back and easily browse a lot of the content that we had posted over the years. So, for us, we literally had to go back page- by-page, one at a time, or ten pages at a time to try and find the content. This was very time consuming and almost never utilized,” says Weston Carter, Director of Multimedia and Video Services at Auburn University.

Another issue that Weston and the team faced was the ability to review user engagement. With no analytics or permissions in place, it was difficult to examine who was interacting with their media, how often it was being used and where it was being used.

The solution

Auburn Athletics Department originally commissioned the platform and trialled Imagen during last years’ football season. After receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from media partners, as well as staff, students and alumni, Auburn decided to use Imagen to expand their video library to include all their sporting disciplines.

“The exposure for our sports grew exponentially, with over 30 states downloading our content. Within the first 45 days, over 145 hours of media had been downloaded. Coupled with key word searches, we could track and have a better idea when users are looking to capitalise on our content,” says Weston.

Their new dedicated video sharing platform enables logged in users to search and play back game highlights, as well as interviews, press conferences and exclusive behind the scenes footage. Power users can create clips, make collections and download high resolution files ready for broadcast. The selfserve platform offers plenty of choice, delivers a feature rich user experience and is a great time saver for local journalists and production teams.

“We’ve been incredibly impressed with the Imagen platform. We’re working a lot smarter with our media delivery now that we have a self-serve system, effectively taking the burden away from our staff.

Even if our media requests increase, users can now fulfil their own needs,” adds Weston.

Results

With the Imagen Media portal in place, Auburn are now able to operate far more efficiently.

One of the major challenges was to improve engagement tracking for all user interaction. Auburn can now review using Imagen’s User Analytics feature to find out what their users are interested in and, what they are not. With this valuable insight, Auburn can hone their production strategy to create even more compelling content that aligns with audience trends.

“What we found was we had a much bigger audience than we could have ever anticipated. For us, we had no idea that this was how our users were looking to download this content. We found we had extended use in unknown markets. Imagen gave us the capability to benefit from these and get our content out there to grow our brand regionally and nationally,” says Weston.

 Auburn’s solution not only enables secure access to valuable content, it provides an elegant delivery system that has been fully branded to reflect the high standards and quality associated with the college. While the platform itself, enabled Auburn to quickly deploy and scale with their growing needs.

 “Everyone was able to use the system within five minutes, there was no training required,” says Weston. “All of our staff loved it and think it looks great.”

Key benefits 

MOBILE DEVICE FUNCTIONALITY
If sports communication staff are out in the field, they can shoot their content and upload it to the platform, providing far greater flexibility.

GUARANTEED SECURITY
Introducing granular permissions specific to the Auburn platform ensure that valuable content is protected.

IMPROVED ACCESSIBILITY
Users can upload and download to the cloud based platform anywhere in the world.

IMPROVED ANALYTICS
Providing instant insights, including interactions and searches, to determine what media is in demand.

QUICK IMPLEMENTATION
The new archive was created in just two days, in time for the college football season.

IMPROVED SEARCHABILITY
Time based metadata schema ensure Auburn’s library is catalogued for pinpoint searchability.

"Imagen delivered a completely cloud-deployed system that exceeded our expectations. A lot of the things we were looking to do were barely scraping the surface of what Imagen is capable of doing, which makes this a very exciting prospect for the future."

Weston Carter, Director of multimedia and video services, Auburn University