Eleven Sports expand digital ecosystem with Blackbird cloud editing and publishing

Posted: 18/09/2020

Since launching in 2015, Eleven Sports has been disrupting the traditional media landscape with a platform agnostic service that gives fans access to the live action whenever and wherever they want to consume it.

Part of global sports investment and innovation group Aser Ventures, Eleven Sports has established itself in Belgium, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Italy, Taiwan, Japan and Myanmar with additional territories to follow. The group’s portfolio includes tier 1 international competitions like La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Premier League, UEFA Champions League, F1 and the NBA as well as a host of local sports rights in each market.

The company’s OTT and social platforms continue to be the cornerstone of its long-term strategy. In addition to Eleven’s regional platforms, the group will launch a new digital global hub later this year to deliver a wealth of new sport content to fans around the world.

In addition, Eleven is extending its content portfolio with the launch of three new verticals.

ElevenWomen will showcase the best of women’s sport from around the world; ElevenNext will shine a light on more local sport and builds on the group’s longtail strategy in Italy, where Eleven Sports is streaming all the action from Serie C and Serie D to fans for the first time.

A new Eleven esports platform will see Eleven double down on its virtual offering. Eleven streamed over 200 esports events for fans during the Covid-19 lockdown and will now build out a premium eSports destination. These aggressive growth plans are founded on an innovative digital first and data led approach to video content production and distribution.

“We’ve built a global community of fans, a world-class portfolio of rights and a host of platform innovations that differentiate us from our competitors. We have disrupted the status quo to democratise access to the best sport content and delivered on our mission to be fully platform-agnostic and fan-centric.”

Luis Vicente, CEO, Eleven Sports

The company relies on Blackbird to rapidly clip, edit and publish sport content seconds after live to its channels on-air, online and social media. Eleven selected Blackbird for its unparalleled speed to air and high quality output and are now able to take advantage of Blackbird’s enterprise class scalability to fulfil its ambition.

Extensible and Interoperable, Blackbird’s technology is so lightweight it needs just 2 Mb/s for editorial and marketing teams to log, clip, package, distribute and syndicate broadcast quality on-demand video content to OTT, web and digital platforms.

Since launch, Eleven Sports has produced over 5 million hours of world class entertainment from 20,000 live events distributed to over 150 platforms and a legion of 4 million social media followers.