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Project Overview

Take the Olympic Games with you! The Foxtel LONDON 2012 App is your portable companion to the most extensive coverage of an Olympic Games ever seen in Australia.
- Watch 8 dedicated channels whereever you are, available on wifi and 3G
- Catch up in your own time on all Gold medal events
- Watch all the action simultaneously on the 8 screen multi-view page
- Browse "Must Watch" sessions for each day of the Games
- Keep up to date with the latest results and medal table
- Plan your viewing with the LONDON 2012 Channels Guide
- Remote Record to your iQ or MyStar

Organisation

Foxtel

Team

Jim Rudder
Peter Campbell
Michael Ivanchenko
Kym Niblock
Mark Wilson
Dom White
Brett Patton
Pete Gonzi
Nolan Chen
Carol Chang
Harris Hutkin
Philippe Lasserre
Ed Follows
Chris Marris
Amisha Puri
Bas Den Hartog
Jason Smith
Benjamin Cox
Susan Panelli
Sam Hall
Geoff Kwan
Matt Chandler
Chris Walters
Stephen Huffadine
Dave Dunshea
Simon Pain
Renny Nanaiah
Alex Saunders
Andrew Hunt
Paul Meyer
SWITCH Media

Project Brief

As an Australian first, the Foxtel London 2012 App brings 8 live, dedicated Olympic Games channels streaming to your tablet across Wifi and 3G for our Residential Sports subscribers.

Watch all 8 channels at once, available 24/7 on the 8 screen multiview and if you miss any of the live sessions, the App’s Catch Up section has all of the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and every Gold, Silver, and Bronze Medal event captured to VOD for instant viewing. That’s over 700 hours of Olympic Games VOD available to watch anytime, anywhere.

If you missed part of an event or simply want to replay a great moment you can rewind any of the 8 live streams back 30 minutes and, as well as viewing VOD from every sport, the App also contains Opening & Closing Ceremonies, Athlete interviews, past Olympic moments, News and Documentaries and colour stories from the London 2012 broadcast.

Keep up to date with the latest medal results for every sport and follow Team Australia’s medal tally. And with the majority of events available on VOD, the App allows users to launch and watch an event directly from its respective result view. The App also comes with an interactive TV Guide of the 8 dedicated channels and the ability to remote record and change channel on your Foxtel iQ box, as well as filtering by sport.

Project Innovation / Need

The Foxtel LONDON 2012 App has set a new standard on what to expect out of streaming video on tablet devices. No other Australian broadcaster has provided as extensive live streaming coverage as the App’s 8 dedicated channels and its 8 screen multi-view experience. Enlisting leading streaming technology, the App provides an automated bitrate solution in order to give the user the best possible viewing experience based on their connection. Additional innovation lays in the ability to rewind live play 30-minutes from the time a user launches a stream.

Also introduced is a VOD capture technology that rapidly captures, encodes, and publishes to the App a live program (of any duration) in less than 30 minutes after it has finished. This allows Foxtel to quickly and easily capture and deliver an immense volume of sport sessions across its 8 Olympic channels. In another first, the App provides a unique playback feature called ‘Jump To’ bookmarking. Jump To takes the rapid capture capabilities a step further by allowing our tablet producer to set bookmarks throughout the VOD capture process. For example, during the capture of a 2 hour swimming session, our tablet producers are able to set a bookmark at the start of each swimming event. On playback, a user is then able to jump to these different bookmarks within the VOD to quickly view specific events.

User Experience

Foxtel customers are fully in control of their London 2012 experience whether they want to watch the Olympic Games live, find out the latest results or catch up on the action from their favorite events or athletes.

Given the powerful performances and imagery that accompanies every Olympics, we wanted to present a similar powerful, engaging user experience when first entering the App. To that end, we designed our primary Live TV experience to immediately immerse the user into all the live action by providing a powerful, engaging view displaying the 8 channels simultaneously in a single view while streaming audio from channel 1. Selecting a channel allows the user to watch on quarter screen or full screen player or easily navigate through the other London 2012 channels.

The Catch Up section is designed for a user to easily explore our vast catalog of London 2012 VOD by sport or by top Australian performances, as well as filtering on Most Watched and Most Recent. Due to the length of the VOD sessions, we devised a ‘Jump To’ functionality that allows a user to jump straight to the action or points of interest by clicking on a list of predefined bookmarks placed throughout each program.

The Results section displays the fixtures for all of the medal events, including a section devoted to Australian medals. Additionally, because we have VOD for every medal event, a user is able to launch the VOD session direct from its respective result screen.

The TV Guide is designed to give users a quick way to browse the program lists of the 8 channels in a single view, including the ability to Remote Record or Channel Change to a Foxtel iQ.

Project Marketing

The London 2012 App provides an additional medium for subscribers to engage with our coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games. It provides a genuine value-add to compliment the traditional set-top viewing experience, and adds significant weight to our marketing proposition for the Olympics, whilst building our innovation credentials.

Our marketing of the App focuses on a Foxtel customers ability to ‘take the Olympics with them’, through exclusive access to Olympic events streamed Live on their tablet through 8 dedicated channels and Catch Up VOD.

One of our core target groups for the Olympics is ‘Young potentials’. As the name suggests, this younger group (16 - 29) are a significant segment, with an interest in the less traditional Olympic sports, such as BMX, Beach Volleyball, and Basketball. This group is particularly important for Foxtel’s Olympics campaign as we have unrivalled coverage claims for these non-traditional sports. The ability to access our coverage on the go via the tablet App is both relevant, and highly valued by this group (this segment had the highest use of ‘new media’ for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games).

Our channel Approach targeted this group via a TV campaign across our platform, and on free-to-air. In addition to this we launched an extensive digital campaign through a performance media buy. Through digital targeting, we were able to serve in 100% rotation, our App execution when we knew individuals were browsing via their tablet. This was supported by an extensive PR outreach campaign targeting technology & sport journalists, and key social opinion formers.

Creatively we utilised Australian Olympic Pole-vaulter Steve Hooker, who we know resonates strongly with our target. Steve has been used in our TV campaign demonstrating the product whilst out and about. Our digital executions utilised flash to demonstrate the functionality of the tablet within the context of the banner ad. These ads have been our best performing digital executions across our whole campaign, outperforming our broader campaign creative.