NEW YORK: The National Basketball Association (NBA) is set to co-produce a new mobile-friendly program ‘The Bounce’ alongside US broadcaster Turner Sports that is set to be aired for five nights a week on Yahoo Sports, SportTechie reports.
‘The Bounce’ will be NBA’s redefined evening studio show for a duration of three hours featuring highlights from live games, expert analysis, and personality driven content centred around the ongoing games.
“We definitely want to evolve how telecasts are presented,” NBA SVP for global media distribution and business affairs David Denenberg was quoted as saying to SportTechie.
“Obviously Yahoo is doing that, in conjunction with Turner who is very forward-thinking about this stuff. We think it makes a lot of sense to reimagine the highlight show and what it could look like in a digital age on mobile phones.”
Yahoo will also be providing with a live scoreboard, social media integrations, and behind-the-scenes footage on The Bounce, which will be produced out of Turner’s Atlanta studios and is set for a 21 January debut.
NBA and Yahoo have added ‘The Bounce’ as part of their existing content partnership that expanded to include carriage of NBA League Pass last year.
“It’s about being able to create products that really fit into ways that a sports fan lives,” said Yahoo Sports GM Geoff Reiss, adding that this show is being produced with the “understanding that we are filling gaps in that fan’s night, not necessarily looking to be the whole night.”
“To have the great brand of Yahoo Sports delivering content to our fans and hopefully reaching audiences through mobile—there’s going to be different elements to this show that probably won’t look like your normal studio show—we hope it brings in additional audiences, not just to view The Bounce but also to view our games on the regional sports networks, League Pass, and our national partners,” Denenberg added.
“This is going to be a highly iterative process,” Reiss continued.
“What it’s going to mean is optimizing the show and figuring out what are the right length spokes of the wheels that we build. Are they going to be eight minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes? We will be able to incorporate the data that the audience provides us to know exactly how to block out the show, what’s the right length of segments, what’s the right volume of highlights versus commentary for us to build this thing out.”
“We’re looking forward to producing this innovative form of content for NBA fans as a supplement to the in-depth coverage available on NBA TV and across the NBA Digital portfolio,” NBA Digital’s SVP of production, programming and content Scooter Vertino, wrote in an email to SportTechie.
