Action Sports Streaming Explodes with Gen Z
Learn more about sports streaming at Streaming Media's next event.
Watch the complete presentation from Streaming Media West, ESS102b. The Next Generation, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Remi Guyton: Action sports--people think of it in terms of legacy. X Games has been around for a while, but they don't realize it's the number-four sport on Instagram, so when you have things like their legacy. Soccer's number one, and action sports as a category is number four. They'll say that publicly. It's a huge area, but there's also many opportunities to engage new audiences. One of the things that we found, particularly working with Snap, was there's a whole 13 to 17-year-old range that is really, super engaged with action sports content.
We were expecting things like scooters--because I don't know how many of you are familiar with the fact that scooters is now an action sport. We have guys who are doing the most extreme things on scooters. In fact, one of our guys who started out as--we called him a scooter kid, he's now 23--he just won X Games for the second year in a row as a BMX'er, just because he's that talented and that good. He's the one who I've mentioned has his own YouTube channel. He grew an audience organically over time, and the kids have come up with him.
So being in Snap, a place where obviously kids are engaged on YouTube, kids are engaged on Snap, you see the opportunity for audience there, and you see that things that were unexpected, where we knew scooter was going to do well, BMX was gonna do well, 'cause historically those are things that younger kids are already kind of working with.
What we didn't expect was we launched a show around what we called nitro machines--people showing their dirt bikes, showing stuff. All of a sudden, it's part of a feedback loop where they're submitting to us. It just took off. We didn't know that there was this young, core like, also FMX audience out there that was hungry for content about themselves. 'Cause usually you think of that as kind of an older sport. We work with Travis Pastrana, who's been the leader in stunts and action for so long that you kind of think of it as a little above them. There's just huge opportunity.
Then we also launched a sport competition brand called Nitro World Games, and in that, again, we kind of looked at where can we develop new audience. Traditional action sports did pooh-pooh scooters at first, so initially we had a broadcast deal for Nitro World Games the first year I came on, like three or four years ago. But what we did was, "Hey, we're gonna broadcast the scooter events on Facebook Live." Those did extremely well. The audience was extremely engaged. Then next year with our Facebook streaming deal, we ran that on Facebook because the audience had been so engaged, and was there, and we learned something from just doing it on our own, and that kind of drove a whole new business.
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