I posed this question to Michelle Glover, Assistant Athletic Director for Broadcast Services for the University of Arkansas Athletics. Here, she details how technologies like uStudio have changed the way the Razorbacks work with video, ultimately helping her team deliver more and better content experiences to the Razorback fans.

 

Give us a bit of background on the Arkansas Razorbacks Broadcast Services.

The Broadcast Services team develops content for our website, for SEC network broadcasts, and video board content at our venues. We've got a full gamut of production that we're doing all the time. We did about a hundred and thirty shows last year that were inclusive of the SEC network as well as video boards. We're trying to constantly push content every day that will drive fans to come check out what's new with the Razorbacks. We're also constantly trying to engage with fans on social media, so we're also uploading daily content there as well.

How big is the audience you serve? How would you describe them?

We serve an audience of not only Razorback fans, the millions of people that live in the state of Arkansas, but with our TV broadcasts, we're serving the nation. We're trying to capture everybody, not just the sports fans. We want to capture the people that just want to hear a good story. It's a really diverse group of people ranging in age from little kids to the older population. The fan base here, they love the Razorbacks, and they want to know and be a part of every single thing that's happening. That's really exciting, because if we're providing good content, they're going to eat it up. There's a devotion and dedication here that's unreal.

What are some of the ways you are using video to drive affinity and devotion among your fans?

I think video is so important for us. We can go out and we can grab these athletes off the field and sit down and get to know them and show the home viewers and the fans in our venues, who they are as a person. Fans don't always have the opportunity to meet these athletes. They come and watch the game, and the athletes leave the floor when it's over, but if we have time to sit down with the athletes and really get to know them, that's the way we can connect with our fans. It's our job to seek out those stories and to really showcase them through all of our skills and our creativity. Video is so crucial because of the way people absorb media today. They're getting it on their phones, on their laptops and TV's, and for them to immediately tap in to that athlete by a story that we've been able to tell through video I think is very important.

How were you previously creating and delivering video? What were you struggling with?

When I first got here five years ago, there was a production truck that would come park at our football stadium to do the video board show. There were only four people, including myself. We were running a small tri-caster from venue to venue to try to push out a stream with just two, maybe three cameras, and maybe a video board attached to that. It was very minimal, and it was very substandard equipment. We didn't have great ease with pushing out our video and getting our content in front of the eyes we wanted it to be in front of. We were having to put a lot of our stuff on YouTube, and we couldn't direct our fans to our own website. We had to go to a third party to make anything happen on a mobile device.

Before we had uStudio we were really limited in our ability to reach all the fans we wanted to reach. We didn't have a platform that we were able to easily upload video to, we couldn't do it quickly; we couldn't do it efficiently. We were still stuck in an old media content delivery world that people aren't consuming any more, and that's not at all where we want the Razorbacks to be. We want to be at the forefront of everything we do.

If we fast-forward to today?

Fast forward to today, a short four years later, and we're now a staff of 10 full-time people and 35 students. We've drastically increased all of the production that we're doing. We're developing feature content that we didn't have the opportunity to do before, so we've made a big turnaround from four short years ago.

Coming on board with uStudio, it's totally changed the way we're able to reach our fans. It's very rare to be able to use one platform in all of the ways that we're currently using it. We're able to push out content quickly, efficiently, to many platforms. That's crucial to what we're trying to do at Arkansas. We want to engage as many fans as possible and have as big a reach as possible to get all of those fans invested in being a Razorback. Being able to have a platform that allows us to push content easily and people to consume it easily has changed everything. We weren't even able to think in an innovative way before because there were so many limitations.

Can you be more specific about how your creative process and its output has changed? Does the tech actually help your team creatively?

When I first got here, we weren't really doing very much creative content at all. It was primarily press conferences and post-game recaps, and that's about it. Being able to have a platform that allows us to push content easily and people to consume easily has changed everything. We were doing a lot of "check-the-box" type things, and that's not necessarily engaging to a fan. We were doing it because we felt like we had to do it. We've changed our focus on content. We want to tell stories, and we want to get people invested in the Razorbacks. That platform allows us to do that.

My team here at Razorback Sports Network is phenomenal. To see them flourish in doing broadcast as well as starting to tell some really great stories was so exciting. One of our baseball broadcasts we submitted to Sports Video Group, and it won the "Best Broadcast", so we're all really proud of that, that out of the gate we were doing some pretty amazing things.

What does the future look like for the Arkansas Razorbacks Broadcast team?

We are definitely always trying to be on the leading edge of innovation. We want to find new ways to engage with our fans. When we set out to go to any new vendor, any new technology, it's really about a shared vision. We need to ensure that our paths are going to match because our mission is very important to this state and to these fans. We need a technology vendor that can understand that, can help us be innovative and help us go down that road. We may purchase something new that not everybody has, but if it's the best option for us to do what we want to do and try to be new and creative, then that's where we need to go. I think we're going down that road right now, trying to figure out all of the avenues that we can utilize uStudio, because the doors are open now, whereas they weren't before. We want to reach out and find those avenues for video to tell stories in new, exciting ways. We're going to hopefully give Razorback fans all of the video content they could ever want.