The FIFA World Cup in Qatar 2022 revolutionized the way fans participate in the soccer/ football game on Live TV. Qatar announced that it was the most connected competition in history. Digital innovation and new technologies made it possible, transforming the tournament into a new improved live TV experience for fans.
When broadcasters around the world wanted to engage audiences over the live global match and digital feeds, for the biggest sports event in history, they chose Sport BUFF. Across 29 days of continuous live soccer action, up to 15 hrs live match feeds daily, plus live press conferences and studio debates; BUFF changed the way the world watched through its innovative technology enabling fans to play and compete directly over the broadcast.
Viewers and fans around the world were able to interact with the Live TV broadcast like never before:
From rating incredible goals and players, realtime predictions of the scores and winners, answering live quizzes, voting on Player of the Match, and so much more. This was an innovative global first, engaging tens of millions of soccer fans, across the live broadcast of every single of the 64 matches, creating a unique live TV match day experience for fans around the world never seen before.
The BUFF game overlay for the broadcast was available across 4 continents, in 15 languages, and enabled fans to test their knowledge and skills, competing against friends, family and global viewers. Sport Buff transformed the way the world watched Qatar 22!
Sport BUFF gives broadcasters a unique, innovative way to engage fans across all platforms at the same time with interactive graphics (buffs). Buffs can be sent in multiple languages, cross platform: social, web, native mobile , tablet, smart and linear TV at the same time!
The BUFF suite is already the largest of it’s kind in the world and constantly growing: predictions, polls, star ratings, announcements, direct purchase, sponsor buffs, fun facts, voting, quiz and trivia, emoji sliders, are just some of the growing list of engagement.
The way we deliver our "buffs" is cognizant of and integral to the productions we work with, we are not a distraction but a driver to increased enjoyment and the associated benefits this delivers. The leaderboard is a fundamental core in the solution and has been from concept
The scale of data, insights and metrics that BUFF uses to enhance the platform, building on 1000’s hours of live broadcast, 100M’s of buffs and users is unmatched. We are the worlds number 1 fan engagement solution for broadcast across live, digital, match day, and studio.
BUFF offers unique cross-play features for different viewers to compete against each other on different channels and even broadcasters.
BUFF can be deployed and live within minutes, unlike anything else in market.
Sport Buff is born out of unparalleled expertise from the worlds of Sports Broadcast and Fan engagement from its founders: Benn Achilleas’ leading work in fan engagement for sports and Jonty Whitehead’s Emmy award winning sports broadcast experience.
Delivering a global live tv experience took a colossal effort from all members of the team.
Technical integrations were required with broadcatsers around the world, with their own video players, platforms, configuarations, and languages.
Another challenge was coordinating buffs from both global content and individual broadcasters, making sure it all enhanced the audience live TV experience. This was supported with daily update calls and communications with all broadcasters, combining insights from their live tv activations the day before and planning key content for the coming daily 15hrs of live sports.
All of the broadcasters deployed and ran BUFF themselves, with a small amount of integration support and <2 hrs of remote training for the dashboard CMS. Consider that one of the broadcasters signed and went live just days before the start of the Qatar22!
From the Broadcast Centre in Qatar and BUFF HQ in London, UK we were able to engage and fully service broadcasters around the world from Colombia, to South Africa, to Israel, to the Philippines, with our cloud solution - without the need for any physical travel of team or equipment. This shows a fully scalable solution that is both sustainable and environmentally positive removing the need for the significant carbon footprint of traveling a team of staff to events and shipping hardware.
Across Qatar 22 live TV:
A total of 40M viewers chose to see and use BUFF across their Qatar 22 live TV experience
Almost 200M buffs were engaged with by fans around the world
Fan engagement peaked at 63% on some broadcasts - this means 63 in every 100 viewers chose to play along with BUFF on live TV.
BUFF directly increased audience watch times up to 266%.
The average rating by fans of the BUFF experience was 4.4 out of 5 stars.
Sport BUFF directly created $MM of new media inventory with Sponsor Buffs.
With regard to the target audience and engaging them in Qatar22:
62% of the audience using Sport BUFF with 25 years of age and younger
Every broadcast stated the results exceeded their targets.
KAN (Israel) said: “ Sport Buff is a unique tool that can be the next step for boosting experience when you’re watching live TV... It's a game-changer for user experiences."
