CROATIAN BASKETBALL COVERAGE SCORES BIG WITH AUTOMATED PRODUCTION

BACKGROUND

Even though it is a small country, Croatia has long been considered a big name in basketball, fielding many stars who have played on top teams in Europe and in the NBA. The Croatian Basketball Federation (CBF) is the governing body for basketball in Croatia. It oversees three leagues: the Premier men’s league, the Men’s first league (second), and the Premier Women’s league, which each include 12 teams for a total of 36 teams.

OBJECTIVE

The CBF wanted to increase visibility and grow their leagues but was hampered by the prohibitive costs of producing and broadcasting so many games to a relatively small market.

They decided therefore to increase the exposure of their basketball games by streamlining their process and cutting production costs for all three leagues. Their goal was not only to increase visibility but to find a way to stream more games without increasing their budget.

CHALLENGE

The CBF faced several challenges in implementing its objectives. The main challenges were:

1. The cost of producing the games using a single camera operator, and a graphics scorekeeper.
2. The lack of infrastructure at the venues where the games were played, including insufficient Internet connectivity.
3. The lack of resources to cover the women’s premier leagues.

With over 200 games per season for the Premier men’s team alone, streaming all the games had a significant cost. As a result, there was insufficient budget to cover the Men’s first league and the Premier Women’s league.

SOLUTION

The CBF installed 29 Pixellot systems at key venues, to provide automated sports production and streaming capabilities for the leagues. Combining Pixellot’s analytics platform VidSwap, coaches are receiving analytics and breakdowns of each game with access to the footage of other teams and events.

OUTCOME

In their first year, since the project began in April 2022, the CBF streamed over 1,000 games, including men’s, women’s, and youth leagues, with over 370,000 views and an average view duration of nearly 11 minutes. The CBF broadcasts the games on their website and YouTube channel featuring commentators, a scoreboard, and game data from Genius Sports.

Without increasing their budgets, the 29 systems installed at key venues, have enabled the CBF to improve and standardize production quality for the premier league as well as increase visibility and live coverage for it and the other leagues that previously had limited exposure. For the first time in history, the Women’s Premier league is now streamed as well.

This has opened up considerable new opportunities for advertising and sponsorship as over 4 million impressions and a CTR of 5.2% have been recorded within the first few months of operation.