Pro surfing league brings ESPN, YouTube and Facebook on board for event broadcasts

surf

We have been touting YouTube as an alternative sports channel basically since the inception of this site and it looks like it has taken another major step forward in that direction as part of a deal that includes the Association of Professional Surfers (ASP), ESPN and Facebook.

The 3-year deal will start next year and calls for ESPN to recap 26 ASP events in a series of 11 broadcasts, while the ASP YouTube Channel will show all 26 events live for surfing fans. Facebook will serve as the primary social-platform partner, with the important goal of seeking to drive fan engagement via both broadcasts and connecting fans to the athletes themselves.

A look at the role that YouTube plays shows how its importance is growing. Over the course of the season next year it will broadcast, along with a new ASP website, over 3,000-plus hours of exclusive programming, including 26 live-streamed events across the men’s ASP World Championship Tour (WCT), the women’s ASP WCT and the ASP Big Wave World Tour (BWWT).

The three way partnership also shows the growing impact that social media players are having on the broadcast industry. A recent deal between the NFL and Twitter is another example of how the two areas are starting to find common ground for growth. Major League Baseball has also been very active with social media partners including with Instagram where fans can tag photos of themselves at games.

These types of deals are good for both broadcasters and fans. There is obviously too much surfing coverage for just ESPN, with its already full plate, to handle. By partnering with someone such as YouTube, fans win by not getting shut out of viewing most of the events live and the two broadcast partners both help grow the interest in the sport. The ASP claims that it has 120 million fans worldwide.

The ASP deal for ESPN only holds for its U.S. broadcasts and the surfing association said that it is looking for related deals to bring the sports to the airwaves around the globe.

Timeout Tuesday: GoPro Signs ‘Kelly F*cking Slater’ — Many More Hours of Video Consumption Ahead

Over the last year or so, we’ve noticed that when we’re out skiing it’s not uncommon to see more and more people with the little boxy GoPro camera mounted on their helmets. But news from last week of GoPro signing 11-time surfing champion Kelly Slater to its team of athletes speaks to a bigger agenda for the cool-cam company: Hell, it’s already on its way to becoming a new media powerhouse of its own.

You want social, user-contributed content? GoPro’s got that in spades, using user-submitted videos in its national broadcast commercials. Those home-spun efforts trail the professional athlete/professional production videos GoPro puts out on its own, usually with some cool new music to boot. The company also gives away a bunch of GoPro gear every day. Is this the new way to sports media or what? I mean, I like SportsCenter as much as the next guy, but I could lose hours watching stuff like this:

And a million and a half people so far have watched the GoPro video of Holly Beck diving alongside a whale shark, and probably not just because she’s wearing a bikini while doing so:

Oh yeah and GoPro also earlier this year signed snowboarder Shaun White to its team of cool athletes. This isn’t something that’s going to happen, it’s already here. Call Slater a late jumper on the bandwagon. But we’re looking forward to wasting plenty of time watching him on the waves.

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