The International Basketball Federation (Fiba) has detailed a cooperation partnership with technology company Google which is designed to deliver a premium experience to fans who cannot be at the ongoing World Cup in China.
Through the tie-up, fans can find news, schedules, results and video highlights from the official Fiba channel on Google’s video-sharing platform YouTube, and more from the Google results page.
On YouTube, a dedicated World Cup playlist will appear when searching, featuring all the best plays and highlights coming from the Fiba channel.
Nicolas Chapart, Fifa’s head of digital, said: “This cooperation reinforces the global impact of our event on digital and will contribute to delivering a premium experience to those who don’t have the opportunity to be in China.”
Tomos Grace, YouTube’s head of sports in the EMEA region, added: “Sport consumption is changing, fans expect to follow their favourite events in different ways and on different platforms. Fiba has long recognised this with a strong year-round offer of live games, highlights and behind-the-scenes programming on the Fiba YouTube channel.”
Fiba has taken a proactive approach to live streaming its age-grade games on Facebook and YouTube in recent years. Fans can currently watch around 2,000 age-grade and regional games per year as part of an initiative set up in 2014, but that has failed to deliver a profit given the restricted share of advertising monies on offer.
Across its various club and international competitions Fiba has adopted a ‘hybrid’ approach. It promotes (and invests in) the free live streaming for age-grade games that struggle for broadcast exposure, but also offers the premium LiveBasketball.TV OTT service (priced at €8.99 per month) to showcase its top properties.
Fiba set up its YouTube channel in 2007 and it currently has upwards of 832,200 subscribers.
The World Cup commenced on August 31 and will run through to September 15.