World leading fan engagment
With the battle for fan attention never greater, The R&A wanted a website for The Open Championship Event that would lead not only within the golf industry but also in the wider sports world. The platform we delivered acheived this through offering an unprecedented insight to The Open with an immersive experience for the millions following it online around the world, driving both fan engagement and commerical performance.
Product Features
Leaderboard & Stats
At the centre of the experience was The Open's iconic yellow leaderboard, reimagined as a digital interface to give fans multiple ways to follow scoring and stats, view player performance, access content and customise their experience.
Live scoring data provided by SMT was processed by tec:agency and made available by a high performing API to deliver scores on the website faster than any mainstream broadcaster.
Rapid Publishing & Editorial
We empowered the The Open commentary team with the tools to rapidly publish rich news, stats, photography and video from across the Championship and enable fans to follow and explore all the stories as they developed over 4 Days, 18 Holes and 150 golfers.
Custom-styled posts could be generated in seconds and the system is integrated with the Sitecore Media Library, StreamAMG’s video library, Twitter and Instagram to support posting content in any format.
The Open TV
The Open TV allowed users access to multiple live on course video channels configured for individual TV rights across global markets, as well as being able to explore hundreds of highlight clips from the Championship and beyond.
The Open TV was constructed using video carousels that self-populated during the championship using dynamic video feeds generated in StreamAMG’s Cloud Matrix platform. The Open Radio feed was broadcasted globally using a custom-styled StreamAMG player.
Tee Times & Course
Fans could track every player and group throughout the day and across the course, with detailed stats and information showing how each hole was playing.
Media Centre
The world’s media could access exclusive media content through a secure online Media Centre in a range of formats. Player Interview transcripts were created in real time by ASAPsports transcribers and published on the website automatically within minutes.
Fan engagement powering commercial performance
Key to the experience was an interface that felt simple to use but also encouraged deep exploration, making it easy and exciting for fans to discover of the wealth of content and data across the site, and then connecting this seemlessly with promotional messaging and conversion pathways.
Technology
Additional systems integrations were required to deliver the live event experience in collaboration with specialist partners. All integrations were realtime and optimised to perform under extreme load. Live scoring data, media assets and website HTML were cached and server via global CDN's to ensure fast load times across all devices.
The new platform carded impressive results during its first Championship, far exceeding the targets set by R&A and it’s Commercial Patrons
DURATION
THE SITE
