Throughout the 15 day span of the US Open in New York, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) will be tweeting real-time videos and tournament highlights via Twitter’s Amplify platform. Heineken, a US Open sponsor, will also feature prominently in the short video spots.
The US Open is using Snappy TV, a video-publishing service which allows users to edit videos “in the cloud” and publish seamlessly to a social platform. As a result, fans will get highlights and “near-live” material on Twitter as quickly as possible, according to USTA’s digital strategy lead Nicole Jeter West,
In addition to the quick videos, the USTA is providing a live feed of the tournament which, like Kitten Cam, can be highly engaging or rather unsatisfying — depending on when you’re watching (the kittens could be sleeping, or there could be a break between matches).
@Heineken_US has been ferociously retweeting @usopen in order to synchronize their TV branding efforts with their social branding efforts, which is in general an undertaking Twitter officially recognized as significant back in May.
Vintage Donald Young, defending the baseline against Klizan w/ a cross-court passing shot winner! #Court11 WATCH: – http://t.co/r7ugx342eX
— US Open Tennis (@usopen) August 27, 2013
It’s a smart play for the USTA, as there are doubtless scores of American sports fans who approach tennis with the same groaning attention span they do baseball.
Unfortunately at this moment, Snappy TV’s video client quality is a bit unreliable (it gets choppy), it’s not very user-friendly (compared to YouTube), and, in this context, the video is restricted to US-only viewers.
But Amplify is, so far, a nice complement to Vine, and a meaningful gesture toward traditional television broadcasters that want to efficiently target viewers who have developed a habit of watching TV (with the subsequent ads) and then go onto Twitter to post about what they’ve seen.
How is your brand using Twitter’s new social video sharing tool Amplify?
