Another Take on UFC's Facebook Strategy

by Bloody Elbow on Jan 25, 2011 4:02 PM EST in UFC Analysis

This is a guest post by BloodyElbow.com reader, tech enthusiast Andrew Machado. You can follow Andrew on Twitter: @pelechati.

I read yesterday on BloodyElbow.com why the UFC went with Facebook to live stream the four preliminary fights from UFC Fight for the Troops 2. I found that article to be a bit misleading. There are a few primary factors/reasons the UFC put the preliminary fights on Facebook. They are as follows:

1. Scale. Plain and simple, the best bang for the buck is letting the nearly 600 million users of Facebook the opportunity to watch UFC fights by simply becoming a fan of Facebook.com/ufc. This was talked about earlier in the week on the site.

2. Leverage. I believe about a year ago Zuffa held the fighters conference to explain to them about bettering their brand by leveraging Twitter and communicating with their fans more often. This same type of tactic applies in streaming the fights on Facebook. UFC.com will never attract the level of frequent visitors that sites like Sherdog and Facebook do. It's why you constantly see them putting videos on YouTube, running contests on Twitter. If you can't beat them, join them. Take a look at their news section, you'll see many articles that are actually hosted somewhere other than UFC.com.

A lot of users talked about how beautiful the stream was on Facebook. The stream was simply a Microsoft Silverlight embed most likely streamed directly from the provider of Zuffa's choosing. There wasn't any special magic that Facebook provided Zuffa by allowing the stream to take place other than the nearly 600 million users on the service. My hunch is Zuffa knew how many streams they were going to get or had a basic idea with market research, so they were able to get a hosting company like Akamai to handle all the traffic.

Also the reason the stream gets nicer when full screen is because more pixels are needed to maintain image quality at a larger size. I'm sure most people probably left it in a small window in an extra browser tab, but when you go full screen they will push a bit more data down the pipe to your computer to make the image that much more crisp. By doing this approach they save bandwidth on the people who don't make it bigger, but at the same time ensure the users who really care to make it full screen get a great picture as well.

For the next set of prelims that is not televised I think UFC will add in the Facebook Chat feature that sits to the right side of the stream. This will allow you to chat with friends and publish out updates about the stream to your newsfeed. They likely didn't do that for this version due to testing scaling (if the fights for some reason went viral through Facebook's newsfeed the hardcore users could've seen streaming problems). You can see an example of what the chat looks like here.

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Comments

Great info. Thanks for posting.

Still a Beer Monster.

http://www.instrength.com

by Tim Burke on Jan 25, 2011 4:04 PM EST reply actions

Glad you liked it

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by Luke Thomas on Jan 25, 2011 4:28 PM EST up reply actions

Having a chat feature

would be a great value add if they continue with the facebook stream.

Why I never joined a frat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-KNVrZaN8M

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by Chris Barton on Jan 25, 2011 4:36 PM EST reply actions

mine failed to load

I kept getting this “application failed to load the components” but I heard a lot of people say how great it was. At one point i caught a glimpse of lowe doing some dry humping but then went back to the play screen WTF! anyone know how to correct that for next time??

by Dr Tyronious on Jan 25, 2011 4:37 PM EST reply actions

I'm with you

I tried about 5 times and then gave up.

Use more judges.

by MasonA on Jan 25, 2011 4:53 PM EST up reply actions

i missed the prelims but watched the weigh ins.

the chat feature that was enabled during weigh ins wasn’t up for the fights? Why one and not the other I wonder.

by silent.bisonte33 on Jan 25, 2011 5:03 PM EST reply actions

“Also the reason the stream gets nicer when full screen is because more pixels are needed to maintain image quality at a larger size. I’m sure most people probably left it in a small window in an extra browser tab, but when you go full screen they will push a bit more data down the pipe to your computer to make the image that much more crisp. By doing this approach they save bandwidth on the people who don’t make it bigger, but at the same time ensure the users who really care to make it full screen get a great picture as well.”

Hmm, that’s odd…that didn’t seem to be the case for me. On my computer it would be what you’d expect…looked good on the Facebook page, but when I made it full screen, it looked fairly blurry. Not that I’m complaining, I was real happy to get four free fights, I just found it odd that my experience seemed to be different from that of other people. Any idea what may have caused this?

by Jeffigatame on Jan 25, 2011 5:08 PM EST reply actions

I don't know what may have caused it...

but my experience was the same as detailed in the article – OK picture in small window, but smooth, HD picture when full-screen.

by Ogueira on Jan 25, 2011 5:12 PM EST up reply actions

Silverlight also has some slick abilties to auto-tune the feed based on what you can support. So a user on a super fast connection may automatically see it in very high quality where a user on a very slow connection will see a lower quality version. It attempts to provide the highest quality it can without causing the constant buffering….. buffering….. buffering

by carpediem on Jan 25, 2011 6:00 PM EST up reply actions

Biggest reason: The Power of the Facebook Like

This is a smart, thoughtful post. One thing I think can’t be overestimated is the importance of the Facebook “Like,” which basically opens a permanent stream to the user to send advertisments from now until eternity. That’s why UFC used Fight Night prelims as a lure to beef up their Likes. This business decision will pay dividends literally for decades, or at least as long as Facebook owns the social media space.

█♣█
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Cause people from a distance can't tell who is who -- Jay-Z

by thetakeover on Jan 25, 2011 6:20 PM EST reply actions

Plus with all the invasive facebook advergaming, they can probably compile a pretty slick database of the users.

by verloc on Jan 25, 2011 7:16 PM EST up reply actions

applitisement? I dunno.

by verloc on Jan 25, 2011 7:19 PM EST up reply actions

yay for the like button generation

should the prelims stream become facebook exclusive i’ll accept segregation by intellect and just pirate it

shiatsu black belt

by Shnoobles McShnoobington, Esq. on Jan 25, 2011 7:22 PM EST up reply actions

With a name like that

I can’t tell if you’re if you’re baiting or not.

by Nanoob on Jan 25, 2011 7:32 PM EST up reply actions

thanks for the fullscreen explanation. I had solid picture, but left it small (assumed the picture would get worse the bigger i made it) will try fullscreen next time

by tkired on Jan 25, 2011 8:11 PM EST reply actions

I watched it on my 55" LCD, looked great....

I watched it via my lap top connected to my 55". It looked pretty damn good IMO.

by KidThunder on Jan 25, 2011 9:01 PM EST reply actions

Both your points are exactly the same thing.

If you want to talk about leverage you should talk about how this being a success gives them more leverage over their traditional partners for broadcasting events.

by Atgreat on Jan 26, 2011 12:28 PM EST reply actions