Fan link-up service wins sports innovation award
February 1, 2018
A service which allows sports fans to create virtual living rooms, enabling friends and families to watch TV together, has won a BT sports media innovation award.
The winner of the BT Infinity Lab competition, Sceenic, will now be trialled by BT Sport for potential future use by the company. London-based Sceenic’s solution claims to increase audience engagement for broadcasters by enabling users to enjoy a group viewing experience.
This is the second time the BT Infinity Lab has helped BT Sport to run the competition and Sceenic could follow in the footsteps of previous winners, Seenit, who are now a key and pivotal part of BT Sport’s Premier League Tonight show.
The round-up show covering all Premier League matches has a particular focus on engagement with fans. Using Seenit’s video collaboration platform, it involves fans sending in questions for BT Sport pundits to answer as well as supporters summarising matches they’ve been watching across the country on video and sending their films to BT Sport for host Jake Humphrey to show.
This year, entries were encouraged to focus on disrupting traditional broadcast approaches, including capturing the in-venue experience; encouraging interaction between sports fans; uses of data; ways of making live sports more accessible for impaired viewers; and new technologies such as virtual reality (VR).
The competition was backed by BT Sport presenter Craig Doyle and Jamie Hindhaugh, chief operating officer of BT Sport, who both featured on the “Dragon’s Den” style panel which interviewed the final shortlisted companies at the BT Sport studios in London.
Hindhaugh said: “Sceenic reflects what BT Sport is all about – which is bringing our audiences into our content, driving engagement and being a broadcaster that speaks with our fans.”
Paul Bojarski, CEO at Sceenic, said: “The idea came from me trying to watch sport over distance with my dad. We’re about togetherness, and BT has so much live content it will be amazing to test our technology with its users.”
The winner will now also receive six months’ membership at TechHub with access to their workspace and events.