Bleacher Report Scores with Real-Time Video Highlights Delivered by Cloudinary

• Sales & Marketing

• Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

Bleacher Report was seeking a way to further enhance its content offerings by delivering short video highlights while games were still in progress. But with nearly 85 percent of users accessing Bleacher Report content on mobile devices, the company needed to ensure that short video highlights could be created quickly and streamed flawlessly, regardless of the viewing device or bandwidth. Delivering video content to users across different devices is not a trivial task. To do so, Bleacher Report would have to manipulate and optimize each video to suit every viewing device, viewport and bandwidth.

Bleacher Report is a global digital destination for sports fans, creating and collaborating on content at the intersection of sports and culture. Owned by Turner, a division of Time Warner, Bleacher Report’s website and social channels focus on sports culture for the next generation of fans. Bleacher Report also has a five-star mobile app and popular email newsletters, which are part of the company’s strategy for instantly delivering in-depth articles, results and video highlights personalized for users’ favorite teams, players and leagues.

Bleacher Report uses Cloudinary to automatically transcode videos into a streamable format, adjust their quality and resolution, implement adaptive bitrate streaming and deliver them through a fast, reliable content delivery network. These features ensure that viewers experience a smooth playback irrespective of device requirements or internet connectivity. When the development team began to work on its video highlights offering, Bleacher Report had been managing images with Cloudinary for nearly a year. The Cloudinary solution offered a rich feature set that Bleacher Report used to optimize and manipulate images by simply changing the parameters in the image URL, and deliver them responsively to users — capabilities that were not possible with the company’s homegrown image management system. After seeing how quickly and easily integration and implementation was for the image solution, Bleacher Report decided to extend its relationship with Cloudinary for video management.

• Cloudinary’s seamless integration and ease-of-use accelerated the development process, enabling Bleacher Report to go from concept to an automated video highlights offering in under five weeks.
• Bleacher Report automatically extracts interesting moments from the live footage based on specific criteria. The raw file is then uploaded to Cloudinary, which processes it in real time to deliver a video, enhanced and optimized for viewing on any browser or device, at any bandwidth.
• Behind the scenes, Cloudinary eliminates many of the technical complexities that content producers like Bleacher Report experience when trying to optimize the video experience. Cloudinary automatically adapts the video resolution and quality, transcodes it into a streamable format, implements adaptive bitrate streaming and delivers the videos through a fast, reliable content delivery network. This ensures that viewers experience a smooth playback irrespective of device requirements or internet connectivity.

• 25% Increase in total video views per month
• 20% Increase in monthly highlight video views in the app
• 35% increase in monthly 3-second video views