Case Study: How a niche sport leveraged data to engage with fans

Live sports broadcasting has long been a staple source of entertainment around the world, but until fairly recently minority sports struggled with the cost of infrastructure to bring their events to wider audiences.

The advent of live streaming and the ongoing democratization of video production has had a significant impact. Combined with falling equipment costs, it has enabled sports clubs and niche sports federations to afford entry level production technology, offering high quality results that allow them to present professional content to new markets.

Democratizing access to niche sports

Our work with USA Powerlifting is a great example of bringing a niche sport to a wider audience, and leveraging the opportunities afforded by live streaming.

Bryce Lewis is a former record-breaking powerlifter who now intersperses his coaching, refereeing and training with creating streaming content for USA Powerlifting. “In the last decade we’ve seen a big increase in the number of people interested in powerlifting, and one of the main reasons is social media,” he says. “Platforms like YouTube have made the sport more accessible to view and made it easier to digest and learn more about it as well.

Alongside that, some of the tools that content creators now have access to have made it all look much more professional. Now more than ever, it’s easy to make high quality videos with great camera quality and good graphic overlays for a fraction of what it would have cost ten years ago.”

A low barrier to entry

USA Powerlifting has been live streaming competitions for several years on its YouTube channel, continually improving the quality of its content as technology has developed. In early 2023, the organization implemented Singular’s live graphics platform which transformed its graphic overlays and the information it was able to display during live streaming.

“First off, l loved that we could try it for free and just get in there and play with it,” says Lewis. “There was a little bit of a learning curve at first, but it was really nice to be able to have just about everything that I wanted to happen on screen actually happen. And this is from someone who’s not an industry expert or someone with a lot of technology experience, so it was a pretty low barrier to entry.”

“For some of the more advanced stuff that we wanted to do involving data integration, I needed to bring in a developer with a little more expertise in how to link up stuff on the back end, opening up the composition script and things like that, but as far as designing things, getting things to animate in the way that I wanted to, I was really surprised and delighted by what I was able to accomplish on my own,” he added.

Advertisement

Data transformation

The first USA Powerlifting live stream to feature the Singular.live graphics platform was a competition in March 2023; since then, Lewis and the team have been adding functionality and creating more complex graphics to integrate statistical data into the overlays.

Lewis was particularly keen to share more information on screen to engage viewers in what they were seeing and to provide background knowledge about lifters and their past results.

“There is a great website called Liftingcast.com which is where most of the people in powerlifting get their information from — it’s very rich in valuable information but it is quite bland to look at. We wanted to harness the information and present it in a more digestible and interesting way, so I spoke to the website owner and was able to get an API so that we were able to integrate that information directly into Singular,” Lewis explains. “USA Powerlifting also has a database of all the lifters’ information about their past competitions, rankings, national records, world records and so on. And so now, because we can integrate APIs with Singular, we can pull that information into overlays as well. Value-adds like this will really transform the way people are watching and engaging with the sport.”

Engaging new viewers

In less than a year, the integration of Singular’s graphics capabilities has contributed greatly to USA Powerlifting’s content. “The feedback we’ve gotten is that the live streams have seen a big increase in production quality,” Lewis says. “People don’t perhaps see the overlays in the same way that I see them, because I built them and I think they look amazing. But viewers are seeing the complete package, they see these great overlays, more camera angles, better lighting, this whole complete picture. 2023 was without a doubt a big step up in quality for our output from the year before, and I think 2024 will continue to see even bigger improvements.”

Lewis already has some big plans in this area, with more data integration and some inspiration from major sports networks — as well as sharing the professional content capabilities at the grassroots level.

“I’d like to flesh out our data integration a little more — for example, when a lifter is on the platform, we already know their national record in one database, and we know what they are attempting to lift on the platform from another database. So now we can compare the two numbers and show the audience at home. If this person makes this lift, it will be a new national record, which adds to the excitement and also gives the commentators more to talk about,” says Lewis. “I’ve also started designing a graphic with picture-in-picture and scrolling graphics down the side and another bar across the bottom with more information, like you would see on the likes of ESPN.”

“However, the biggest thing I would like to do is to open this technology up to every meet director in USA Powerlifting,” he says. “Currently it is only being used at our national championships and the high-level events, but this is a cloud-based solution and I can have multiple outputs. So even local meet directors who are running a competition of 60 lifters can have the same degree of professionalism and presence that we have at the national level. Tools like Singular make that quality accessible to those smaller organizations, it’s something we couldn’t even dream of doing before.