Sports vs Publishers: What the industry gets wrong about content

23:57From this day-old table, you can link to the team page and things like that. There's much more kind of opportunity that gets unlocked if you're able to kind of bring in the raw data and use it however you want to.

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24:57Nick Meacham:I will say, Nick, as your co-host and having worked with you for nearly seven years now, I like to see you happy and I can tell how much you've enjoyed this part. So I've been very happy just sitting in the background as you've been asking away. But I will sort of slightly shift us into kind of a different direction because Ben mentioned a big word, maybe not a big word, but an important word, one that myself, Ben, and Chris spoke about beforehand, talking about the storefront. And basically what you were talking about at Bright Spot is you guys build the storefront. But ultimately, if you've got the storefront, there's got to be something.

25:27Nick Meacham:We've referenced the door multiple times for people to go in and actually buy something. So maybe just talk about how you translate that analogy of building the storefront and then talking about that specifically in a sports context. And then just to go ahead and preempt the next follow-up question that goes from there. You mentioned NBC. NBC's obviously got NBC Peacock, things you can subscribe to. But then on the flip side, not everybody is NBC. Not everyone necessarily has a D2C, OTT streaming platform. So for the people that aren't necessarily in that world, how do they build the storefront?

26:01Nick Meacham:So I guess talk us through the storefront analogy, how you translate that into sports, but then also scale that for someone that could be NBC all the way at the top level. That's got a very clear monetization model for its content versus someone that doesn't necessarily have someone to drive them to that, but there's still value in publishing content nonetheless. The idea of the storefront kind of come, it obviously comes from retail, right? Every retailer or the best ones have kind of a flagship store, and that can be translated over to a flagship digital experience. You want a place where people can go to understand your brand and to visit your brand.

26:42I have kind of a, if you follow me on this analogy, like if you look at an actual storefront, right? I like to think about a bakery. You walk by the window. It's got beautiful cakes and pastries in the window. Maybe there's a nice smell emanating out. It makes me want to come into the store. that's kind of the front and center piece. Once I'm in the store, I'm able to look around, maybe buy some things, experience a nice area. I might want to stay and eat in there. What I'm not seeing is what's happening behind the front of the house, right? Back in the kitchen, the bakers are baking, they're making the pastries, the bread.

27:12Behind them is a loading dock area of stuff coming in. All the supplies are coming in and they're shipping out their products to go to market with their label to bring people back into the store. And then maybe on the way out of the bakery, there's a flyer in the window that says, hey, there's live music down the street. And that's owned by the same guy that owns the bakery. Right. So it's a way of getting people out to other things. So that's kind of a real word analogy for a digital storefront. Right. A place you go, the front of store, it looks really nice. I stay I go click around the site and I'm immersed in the content of the site itself.

27:47what the the cms part of that is the back of house right all the editors working on the content all the content coming in all the content going out um so that's kind of where the the storefront idea kind of originated um and i think that that's what what come what sports organizations are really looking for it's it's how do i build that front end awesome digital experience but also have the content hub behind it, the engine that powers it, right? Because it shouldn't need to be two different things. You should be able to be producing that content and running your storefront in the same space. And then to Ben's point earlier, talked about relying on partners and integrators, understanding what you don't do well.

28:34So that's where at the base, you need stuff coming in, you need shipping, and that's kind of how the backend analogy works there. But I just like to use that to kind of illustrate like in the digital space. And I'm not sure if you have any thoughts. Yeah, and I think with NBC Sports specifically, like having that great storefront allows them to capture, you know, bring their audience in. But then send, you know, they have a huge network of services and capabilities, right? So they're on NBCSports.com, but then they're getting enticed to go to Peacock and sign up for a Peacock subscription service and watch the live event right on Peacock.

29:14Or they're facilitating having them purchase a subscription to one of their other partners or networks, right? So they really use the storefront as a means to really help get them into becoming much more of a engaged and dedicated, loyal customer, not just for the content, but for other – it opens the doors to take them to other parts of their business. And then on the smaller scale and the smaller organizations front, Chris, I think what we're seeing there is just because you're a small organization doesn't mean you should have a mistake. The expectations don't mean users aren't expecting you to have just a bad experience, right?

30:08The bar is still high for these small organizations where they still have to provide a compelling experience to their customers. They still need a respectable storefront. And where we try and work with our smaller organizations is let's do fewer. We have a platform that might do 100 things really well, but for you, let's do 10 of those. Let's start smaller. Let's focus on what is your kind of core messaging and your core story that you need to engage with their users and do those few things really well. And then you can have, you know, on that scale, have a very great storefront, right? And so I'm thinking about Drive, Chip and Putt is who we work with.

30:53So Drive, Chip and Putt is this youth sports competition across the U.S. and Canada where it helps kids ages seven to five compete in this kind of golf competition. And so, you know, their storefront, they have a smaller team, their storefront really still does a few things really well, right? The core things that they need are they need parents to help register their kids to compete in this competition. They need them to go to find where the location is for the event, find this after the events are over. They need a scoreboard. They need a leaderboard. So they do those few things really well on our platform and it is the storefront that they need for their audience and their program.

31:40and then they also have a big event and we'll get I think we should talk more about live events in the scale that at some point but um drive chip and putt has a national finals in in April and you know then that's where they kind of pivot to doing more storytelling and coverage and and making sure that they have content that is covering their national finals so it's it's kind of just finding you know what are those what are those fast lanes that they need to be really good at and helping them achieve that and making the platform work for them and not having them to adopt the whole platform.

32:17Chris Stone:I'm just curious, guys, if you could just give a really simple explanation. For those, I was just thinking coming into this, we probably didn't really talk about it. But when you talk about a CMS, I think for people that don't work in publishing, there might be a bit of confusion as to what a CMS does and also what it doesn't do. And when you need other plugins, other tools, for example, you talked about the shop front. And typically, I don't know if you guys will be doing differently, but for example, you need a cash register. We're going to keep going on the analogy. So you would need a Stripe integration or a payment integration, et cetera.

32:51Chris Stone:Could you, I mean, Chris, if you want to take that one, but like you don't have to keep going on the analogy front unless you want to keep talking about different types of baked goods. But just very simple terms, what does a CMS not do as well as what it does do for those that are looking to focus more attention on it and maybe haven't paid it, given enough attention, but are maybe in a senior position in the industry? What it does do is it's a place for your editing team to go to generate their content, right? So if it's written, it allows you to write the content and kind of piece everything together and package everything up.

33:24So your example of a cash register is great. E-commerce is something that you would need a third party to do. Brightspot is not an e-commerce platform. There are tons of e-commerce platforms out there and you can integrate them very easily. And that's where we thrive. So we talked about a CRM, so something like Salesforce, integrating. We aren't a CRM. And that can be confusing. CMS, CRM, people can kind of use those almost interchangeably. But that's just something that isn't a core competency. And that's by design. right ben talked about focusing on on what these organizations do and that's what bright spot at our company we do is we focus on what we do best which is serving those editors um another thing would be kind of like uh you know newsletters we can we can um compile a newsletter with the content from your that you're creating um but the actual newsletter delivery is something that you know you would have a third party deal so it's anything really that outside of the the content generation and syndication part is really where third parties come in and what about subscription

34:37Chris Stone:and advertising is there anything that you guys do internally or is it all at all done third third party as well i've seen a mix of both but typically of their cms as i have said they've tried to do one don't typically able to do it very well and normally it's best to use third party but i'm not sure what you guys do yeah so a good example would be uh analytics so something like bright spot does have built-in analytics you can get you know page views real-time data um and and have that coming from bright spot but there are a lot of other third parties google analytics adobe parsley there's there's tons of other third party providers that do analytics you know that's what they do yeah um so that's a great example of something that can go either way And even with, like, if you do use the third party, that's great.

35:19Some people like the dashboards and reports that those, you know, products generate. We can ingest that data into Brightspot. So when you're looking at an article right within Brightspot, you can see that data of how it's performing, of how, you know, do A and B testing, all that sort of thing can happen within Brightspot. So I'm trying to think of a way to work that into the bakery, but it's almost like if you hired a musician to come in and play live music in your cafe, it's part of your experience. It's within your store, but that's not your guy. That's not who's buying. One thing I want to jump in back on the track of what the CMS does do is because we've talked a lot about BrightSpot does a lot of full stack experiences where it's both the content engine but also the website and the front end.

36:08But BrightSpot and the CMS also is a very powerful platform for headless applications. And so BrightSpot provides a ton powers from a content and data perspective, all through APIs and data feeds, headless experiences. So like mobile apps, you know, NBC Golf Channel is one of our customers. We're launching their mobile app in a couple of weeks. And so the mobile app is not BrightSpot, but it's getting all of its data from BrightSpot through headless APIs. And there's other customers of ours that want to have their own web application and they want to control the front end and the consumer experience.

36:51But BrightSpot is the data source. And so we do a lot of knowledge management solutions, you know, to help desk support. Like, hey, find me an article on how to, you know, NVIDIA is one of our companies. We do their knowledge management tech support, you know. We're the engine and the data source for their end user tech support documentation. And so BrightSVAC can also, and the CMAS can very much be a headed or a headless solution. So, yeah, it's kind of powerful in both ways like that.

37:26Nick Meacham:To ensure we've got time to talk about it, because it is a chunky topic, you talked about live events, Ben, and there's no better time to be talking about live events as the Olympics are going on right now at the moment. Also really great because you guys work with NBC Sports who are covering the Olympics. so you know you we talked we touched a little bit on like what should be the approach of the thought for people that maybe don't have you know a video platform they're necessarily driving people to from a sports perspective because the live content is so important although we agree you need all the other bits in the shop front to get them to that point when we are talking about live events and you're talking about something like the olympics where there's multiple ongoing events at the same time.

38:06Nick Meacham:They've got multiple different digital platforms, broadcast platforms, all the social media platforms, all the content that's being published. Maybe just talking about like the scale or what needs to take place on your guys' side to make sure that there's a really seamless experience. Because I think one of the frustrations Nick was talking about the other days, it wasn't a very smooth transition kind of going through the ecosystem and being able to deliver and overlap all of those things in a really constructive way for the end user. For live events, there really is no higher stakes than having this huge burst in traffic and having all the eyeballs of a certain sporting world or an audience come to your properties.

38:50And so that has to really start with the nerdy part of things and having a very well-oiled architecture that is built for scale and doing live simulation testing and load testing and really doing architectural reviews of like, how are you caching everything in the cloud? And how do you really make sure that you don't have these bottlenecks or these vulnerabilities where your site can crash at any moment, right? And so you really have to think about purely the the infrastructure part of things is so important and having kind of a well thought through hosting architecture that does perform in scale.

39:33And you have to rehearse that and, and go through all the, you know, the fail, you know, the disaster recovery scenarios because the stakes are just so high. You can't, you can't afford to screw things up. And not only just for live, the known live events, but I think that's really important for media organizations and sports organizations who like can have breaking news at any time right they're like something big can happen for your organization that you didn't expect i don't want to go morbid but i'm just thinking about like when kobe bryant passed away right like that was such an earth-shattering thing that all the eyes in the world were coming to you know we're going to certain sources for that information and if you're not prepared for that like you need to like be prepared you know expect the unexpected, I guess is my point, right?

40:22And so you may not think you're going to have a live event, but you might have one, right? And so you kind of have to be thoughtful about that, you know, kind of 24-7, 365 type stuff and make sure you're prepared for those things. When we talk about NBC Sports and the Olympics, and to be clear, NBC's main Olympic site and and Peacock and all that is not on Brightspot. So Brightspot, we support NBCSports.com. It's still an integral part and part of that storefront for NBC because what we do is help people find where to go for their Olympic information. So this is embedding NBC's Olympic schedule on the site.

41:07You brought up how many events they're going on over this three-week to a month-long period, curling, skiing, long jump, like all of this stuff. It's like, well, how do I find this? Where do I watch? NBC Sports tries to help you figure that out. So it's displaying that Olympic schedule, directing people to Peacock so they can see right off the bat. I can watch, you know, the men's ice hockey semifinal today. I click right here and I go there. Integrating with their other Olympic products. They have an AI chatbot. It's called Oli that's on the site to help kind of find where you can go to watch.

41:45So you can, you know, if you don't want to search through and try and find the schedule and click on an event, you can just say, you know, tell me about USA Hockey or whatever it might be. And so it's basically using the platform to kind of help people direct to the other NBC products that are supporting the Olympics. But aside from that, it's also, you know, NBC Sports still has all of the rights they currently support, right? The NBA is back on NBC. That's a central place on NBCSports.com. So yes, you have the Olympics and you need to support this ongoing event, but you also have, you know, Guinness Six Nation Rugby Tournament.

42:21That's on Peacock and users in the US will come to NBC Sports to try and find that. So it's kind of a two-way thing of supporting the Olympics for the other NBC properties that are running it, but also continuing to support the rights that they have and the ongoing work.

42:39Chris Stone:I'm curious, just taking a step back from the specific examples we've talked about. And by the way, I looked at the npccsports.com earlier and I would say it's a pretty much better experience than one of the other broadcasters based in the US that I actually go to far too often. I often get annoyed with it. Whereas this one's a nice, it's got a nice mix of everything you need to have, different formats. I did enjoy the experience going on there. So kudos to you guys on that. One question I do have actually with regards to the live component is you talked about the stuff going in and out before just curious as to how the the video if someone wants to broadcast live on platform how are you managing that through your your platforms basically again that's through like a lot of customers and that's where like rights management is just such a huge thing in the in the sports in the sports world right like a lot of times these organizations don't have the broadcast rights digitally for their own content, right?

43:35PGA of America is a customer of ours. ESPN does their broadcast, but so people come to pgachampionship.com wanting to watch the live stream. So I think it's a two part answer. One is some of these customers need to get creative on, you know, when you don't have the live broadcast, how do you still create a kind of coverage of your live event? How do you still simulate, you know, give them an experience that helps them engage with the coverage, but it's not the traditional broadcast, right? And so that's where you have to get really creative about doing, you know, you do have access, you do have rights to do to clip the highlights and do kind of real time clipping and, and automation around showing, you know, 10, you know, bite-sized versions of the, of the, of the event.

44:21You can have, you know, behind the scenes covered, having someone cover behind the scenes or the fan experience and doing content creation that like is covering around the event, but not the live broadcast. So that's kind of one track that I think is very important to help customers like still have a compelling creative approach to covering live events. And then on the pure actual live streaming, we partner with, you know, video providers and have their - Oh, the one that you mentioned earlier. Yeah. Yeah. TVE, you know, so we do, we have, you know, it appears as a, you know, native, but like you watch the stream, you got to go authenticate with your TVE provider.

45:06You come back and then you have, you know, you have the token and the permissions to watch the stream. So that's something we're doing a lot more of. And there are different, you know, video providers in the game that are working, that we're working with to, that have those kind of like single side on solutions to the events. and to give an example we talked earlier about like what the cms does versus doesn't do like connecting with that video provider you know if they are the ones producing and playing a live stream right but we're connecting to their system and ingesting you know what we'd call broadcast events so we're building out the schedule they're your tv guide um so for something like golf channel right they can go to golfchannel.com you can watch the golf channel live on golfchannel.com that's through the video provider but we're building out the schedule so i can see the upcoming events that data is saved in the cms with start and end times um and you know any additional metadata that you'd need so um for the live stream component it is definitely a joint operation of of playing the stream and then um building out a schedule so taking now a step back from some of the specific examples we've been talking about what are some of the major changes

46:16Chris Stone:or trends you are seeing in the use or application of the CMS across publishing generally, I think, more than necessarily sports? Because I think we've got a few examples in sports, but more wider, guys. What are you seeing as major trends and changes, perhaps, in how CMSs are being applied and used from the bevy of different sectors you guys are across? Obviously, AI is a huge topic, and it's becoming more prevalent every single day. and one of the things we're seeing is integrating your AI, whether you have a license for any open AI, Gemini, anything like that, integrating that into your CMS and not necessarily, I think the obvious thing is, oh, content generation, right?

47:01Like AI generated content. That is a thing, but that's not the true power. People are starting to integrate AI to build out workflows automatically and to kind of automate a lot of processes within the CMS, whether that be, like I said, workflow generation or A, B testing, right? Being able to test two different pieces of content based on your audience segmentation and get, you know, real-time feedback on that. And I think even another thing is using it as a research assistant built into your CMS, right? So being able to say, if I have a huge content library, I can ask, you know, people are starting to bring in that kind of chat and behavior natively into their CMS to be able to get insights on their own content without having to go out and, you know, use different third party software.

47:51So that's the first one to me that comes to mind. A couple other trends that I'm thinking about are trying to, you know, do more with less and having more consolidation, a system consolidation. So one, you know, having a league has 30 teams, right? They don't necessarily have to have 30 disparate websites on 30 systems, right? There's much more opportunity, I think, now to have one system that has these multi-channel, multi-site capabilities. That's something BrightSpot really does excel in. You can have one CMS and 10 different content teams, but when they log in, they're only getting access to their content and their channel, so to speak.

48:34So I think consolidation and doing more multi-site, multi-channel development on a single system is kind of an important trend where there's opportunities. And then also everyone's trying to, I think, monetize their content through subscription. You know, subscription-based models is becoming more and more. You know, you can't even go to CNN.com anymore without trying to get prompted to sign up. or a lot of everything, paywalled content is becoming much more common. So having capabilities and solutions around subscription paywalled capabilities is pretty evergreen for a lot of different verticals.

49:17Chris Stone:Interesting. So would you suggest, given what you're seeing and what you're hearing, then that there's more of an appetite or push to create subscription-based experiences and paywall-based experiences than there were previously? Because there's obviously a conversation in the media, the industry about there's more and more content than ever. The market's getting saturated with it because everyone's creating it. AI is doing what it's doing, et cetera. But are you seeing that there's more interest now to create a high-quality experience with a paywalled environment as a result of all that? Yeah, for sure.

49:50I think if you have great content, Again, monetizing that is an absolute priority. And so just on a personal level, I can't even tell you how many subscriptions I have to various services. I think I subscribed, and I have two daughters. We probably have three accounts on the same service that I need kind of some reality checking on. But yeah, so I do think that fragmentation is kind of really pervasive. now and a lot of companies are trying to, you know, and there's a whole kind of freemium model, right, where you ungate some of your content to give them a great experience and get them engaged and then you convert them into, you know, getting the access to the rest of your library.

50:43Library requires subscriptions. Yeah, and I think it's a natural progression, like the ability now to personalize content to your different users based on, you know, audience segmentation and things like that is bigger than ever. And so, like, you're almost able not to justify the monetization of it, but you're able to provide a better product. And so people are willing, more willing to pay for it, and they're going to be more willing to pay for it now more than ever because they're getting a better experience. It's personalized to you and your tastes. And so, you know, I think that's just another key that it is going to be if it's not already mutually beneficial to both the consumer and the business.

51:24Nick Meacham:I have one last question I'll wrap things up with because conscious we're running close to our time here. And just it's not even terribly dissimilar to the question Nick was sort of asking, kind of looking forward. But as you given the expertise you guys have across other ways, are there things that you think sports is currently under utilizing in terms of a publishing strategy that you're seeing elsewhere that you think is going to become more popular or something that should become more prevalent? because it currently isn't being utilized to its full strength at the moment. Yeah, I absolutely think sports organizations have so much more digital assets than they give themselves credit for, right?

52:08Or the opportunity to have better content experiences. And a lot of teams are like, okay, we'll do some highlights of the game and we'll put it on our website and it's a traditional video gallery And maybe there's, maybe there's, you know, some editorial, you know, recaps around that. But there's, there's so much opportunity, I think, to get creative with, you know, with kind of for a low effort, you can get really premium experiences just by like, creating and clipping videos in a different way or doing something like, you know, let's do shots of the team in the locker room. And where let's do like a, you know, a little, you know, a little, you know, webisode and things along those lines, right?

52:59You can produce content so much more quickly and easily now. And just kind of putting creative storytelling around that is not a high bar to achieve. And so I think teams should be in sports and organizations can be really producing quality content, you know, with what is at their fingertips. And it's just about kind of, you know, getting the ideas and the ambition and putting that to life. Right. And not thinking you have this captive audience that's going to just come because they love your team. Right. Yeah. And I think a big thing there is authenticity, right? So knowing your brand, like knowing who you are and being able to present that to your users and being authentic.

53:46I think it sounds kind of negative to call that a trend, like that authenticity would be a trend. but it is i think it's just more recognizable now when you find a brand um or content that that is authentic um people relate to that more and and i'm i'm starting to see that with customers trying to make sure that they're more authentic and and whether it's you know a live look in at you know the locker room celebration like that's real that's raw that's you know that's not performative um something like a watch along i'm seeing a lot more of that now of you know like ben mentioned they might not have the rights to the broadcasts but you can watch somebody watching and and that's like for whatever reason a connection and and people gravitate to that so get like ben said getting creative and and really being authentic to try and build that that fan

54:37Chris Stone:community um i think is huge i never thought i'd be seeing watching people watch something but after seeing was a goggle box was the thing that picked up in the uk that made in the us then that blew me away so if ever since then i've now been much more open-minded to watching grumpy old people

54:53Nick Meacham:talk at the tv chris and ben i appreciate you guys coming on today and this isn't to discredit any guests nick or i have ever had in the past but i can tell you from having done several over 200 episodes now i can tell you it's not very often i see nick get this excited and asking questions i think it does partly have to be because what we do at sports pro but i will say at least from nick and i it is really valuable when we have episodes like this because if we're learning something we We feel like that's going to be good content for our audience as well. So I appreciate you guys coming in. Like I said, I'm sure Nick took a lot of joy in asking all of those questions today.

55:26Chris Stone:I'll be following up with you guys with a few more questions after this, I'm sure. But guys, it's been really good to have you on the show. And I look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks at the Sports Pro New York event, where you'll be front and center there as well. We'll hear a bit more from you guys at the event itself. So looking forward to that. Yes, us too. and appreciate the time and the opportunity to speak with you guys. You're really great advocates for the industry. And so it's great to be with you guys today. Thank you. Thank you.