Rugby World Cup has its DIVAs
Sportel: One if the more interesting demos at Sportel involves deltatre’s DIVA (Data Integrated Video Application) and one of it’s current high-profile iterations working out at the Rugby World Cup.
The company’s Ciaran Quinn is something of an evangelist for the forthcoming age of viewers decoupling themselves from their television sets and can cite any number of statistics to support the growth of second screen applications. At the time of the Vancouver Olympics, connected devices outsold TV sets by 2:1, by the time we get round to London 2012 that ratio will be 4:1; in July, Major League Baseball Advanced Media CEO, Bob Bowman, stated that they’d reached a significant tipping point where mobile access surpassed web access for the first time; the IOC is on the record as stating that 10% of value comes from digital…you get the picture.
DIVA puts flesh on those bones by integrating a video player and synchronised data with state of the art design and a good GUI.
The RWC implementation at www.rugbyworldcup.com has three main components. On the video side of things, adaptive streaming using multiple bitrates combines live and/or on-demand feeds with full ‘DVD-type’, features and includes VoD highlights using a rough cut editor tool, not to mention a range of live, replay and highlight modes. Data can be navigated by play by play or timeline methods, and includes team and player stats and overlay navigation. And there is, of course, a fully implemented social media component, Facebook and Twitter integration and so on.
One thing worth pointing out is that it’s not a one size fits all solution. Deltatre has a generic flavour, sure, but it also markets DIVA Football and DIVA Rugby as separate, individually tailored products, while it has additionally built on its experience at Beijing 2008 and Vancouver 2010 to analyse the 38 different Olympic disciplines and provide an adapted user experience for each of them with DIVA Multisport.
How popular could this be at London 2012? The answer is: very. DIVA Football has been used by Sky Sports since March on all the Champions League matches that it pumps through it’s Event Centre and the figures there are impressive: ave time spent online for first time users, 17 mins per night; ave time spent online for returning users, 37 mins; and users interact with the service by clicking on something every two minutes on average. You just have to hope that the ISPs can keep up…