At our annual LA FAST conference, Amagi spoke with Chris Foster, VP, Digital Business Development at the NHL. Foster, who has been with the league for 16 years, spoke about navigating live rights, monetizing content, and delivering the NHL’s FAST channel to hockey fans.
Below are excerpts from the conversation.
How did you build the NHL’s FAST channel?
At the NHL, it's important for us to reach our fans wherever they are, and viewership habits have changed. How they consume content over the last 10 years has radically changed. That's why it was important for the NHL to be one of the leaders to first step into the FAST space from a sports standpoint. Sports leagues have a challenge because live rights can be a little tricky. But for the NHL, we were able to navigate this space and be able to deliver to our fans different types of content that is streamed 24/7, and to really keep the fans up to date with the latest highlights, news about our players, and also to really showcase all the exciting action that happens every single night.
What were the challenges you faced when building these channels?
One of the challenges we faced when we first launched the FAST channel was the technology. How do we do it? That's one of the reasons we came to Amagi, who is best in class, because they could help us, sort of guide us step-by-step-by-step on how to take our entire content of amazing history and our full archive library, to package that in a way that is a consumable 24/7 stream.
But also, how do we take the action and all of the content that happens every single night and find a way to package that through an automated delivery so that we could get the most current game highlights streamed and available to our fans very soon after the game completes?
Any noticeable improvements in productivity, cost, time management, or efficiency?
What's exciting about Amagi … is the innovation that the platform is showing. When it comes to efficiency, when it comes to programming, for instance, schedule planning — that's something that has evolved from a very manual job responsibility to something that can be more fluid and enhanced, and really it leads to overall productivity. So we can have folks on our team that are focused on identifying content as opposed to the manual requirements of uploading and choosing what goes where.
What are the lessons learned along your journey?
I think one of the lessons we've learned as an Amagi customer and just overall content provider in the FAST space is to try different things, and that your content plan may change when you start looking at fan behavior and audience consumption. They might gravitate to some types of content early on, but that might change. And you can't have preconceived notions on what programming will exactly work, because it's a different type of audience, and FAST is a different type of consumption behavior. So keep experimenting, keep trying new content plans, and keep evolving.
The FAST industry is exciting because it's always changing. It's still relatively new, but I think we've just scratched the surface, especially as different platforms become more mature, more premium content owners really start pushing the envelope on what the new type of content will be.
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