The New Zealand Jetsprints 2023-2024 Season
Discover how Volt Media elevated the New Zealand Jetsprints' television highlights and live stream coverage, overcoming challenges with innovative solutions and achieving high viewer retention rates.
Overview
The New Zealand Jetsprint Association approached our team at Volt Media when they were seeking a new partner to elevate their television highlights and live stream coverage. Their brief was to raise the level of the coverage and bring a fresh perspective for their television highlights programme.
Challenge and Opportunity
With a grassroots sports budget, the series presented constraints. The rounds took place across New Zealand, in Wanaka, Featherston, Whanganui, and Meremere, involving extensive travel to remote locations where Jetsprint courses are typically situated. This setup required a reliable solution for the lack of internet and cell coverage, offering us an opportunity to enhance our live stream capabilities and venture into a new sport.
Approach
Our extensive television broadcast experience equipped us to deliver high-quality live stream footage, which also served as the foundation for the TV highlights programmes.
Our key strategies included:
Utilising drones for scenic shots and track maps.
Custom-built graphics with live timing.
A pared-back crew of two camera operators, supplemented by locked-off cameras for varied angles.
Filming driver profiles and technical stories for the highlights programme.
Providing continuous live stream coverage from heats to finals, totalling approximately seven hours daily.
Results
The live stream was highly successful. We saw significant viewership not only on Facebook Live, with the Final from Whanganui getting 26,400 views, but also on the Jetsprint website, where the live stream was hosted. By consistently directing viewers to the website, we observed excellent viewer numbers and strong retention rates. Based on our experience, viewer retention is often higher on a dedicated web page compared to Facebook Live, where users can easily scroll away and get distracted.
This success has led to our commissioning for the 2024 – 2025 series and two rounds of The UMI World Jetsprints Championship. The upcoming year will see a shift to a pay-per-view model