Posted by Patrick Donovan on Wed, Apr 23, 2008 @ 03:48 PM
With the NFL Draft coming up this weekend, it is a great time for you to check out our latest FilmRoom with Sports Illustrated. SI secured video highlights of the top 200 collegiate football players in the country, and then used Gotuit’s patented technology to present those highlights in multiple ways, recognizing that their visitors have different reasons for coming to the site.
For example, if you are interested in SI’s mock draft, choose this path. Or, if you are a huge USC fan and want to easily see just the Trojans in the draft, click here. Maybe your team needs a wide receiver, so you just want to quickly see all the WRs in the draft. Or you just want to see great highlights of your favorite player, such as Chris Long.
Presenting the library with these various paths for the viewer to take results in a more engaging experience and longer session times. Gotuit’s use of metadata allows SI to do this without requiring multiple copies of the videos or any video editing. The source library is unleashed by publishing it with a rich metadata set for the viewers to use to personalize their experience.
SI is also being aggressive about using the embedded player to enhance their editorial coverage with video as you can see in Don Banks’ mock draft article here.
During the draft this weekend, the NFL Draft FilmRoom will be updated to present the actual draft order playlist and playlists for each NFL team so viewers can quickly and easily see who their team came away with.
Too many publishers make the mistake of not optimizing their library by only presenting one path for their viewers to take. SI could have put each video up as a separate clip with a search box, but instead they thought about the various reasons their viewers would have for coming to the site and used Gotuit metadata to offer compelling choices to pull in more viewership. With strong usage distributed across the various paths, this is proving to be a successful strategy.