This Sunday, July 19, 2020 theOlympique de Marseille became the first French soccer club to broadcast one of its matches on the Twitch platform (Learn more). The club indeed took advantage of its pre-season match against the modest club FC Pinzgau Saalfelden (Austrian D3), whose rights were not transferred to a broadcaster, to broadcast the match itself on the market's leading streaming platform.
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Visual of the result of the match source: Olympique de Marseille[/caption]
During the 18:30 to 20:30 broadcast period, the competition was tough. with another flagship event on the platform, the Trackmania Cup 2020 organized by the number 1 French streamer Zerator which was originally supposed to take place in physics at the Accor Arena before the Covid-19 restrictions. However, during these 2 hours of live, OM counted more spectators on average with 86K against 65K for Zerator. (88K for the Trackmania Cup including other streams).
“A broadcast mode that could take up more and more space and weight in the broadcasting rights of the various championships. It would also make it possible to reach a young audience that football players are currently trying to seduce,” says Clément Joffrin, Sport Consultant.
Olympique de Marseille also achieved a peak in spectators with 99K people simultaneously. Usually the best French streamers count between 30-40K viewers (excluding special events) on their content. In total, 142K distinct people attended this live. On average, one person watched the match for 66 minutes.
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Evolution of simultaneous viewers during the broadcast of the match on Twitch.[/caption]
In the chat, a very important space for the community aspect on Twitch, there are 17K messages produced by 6.5K people. This volume remains quite low considering the live audience. It therefore seems that many people attended the meeting from the sites of the various media that announced the meeting or by going directly to Twitch but without having an account allowing them to engage. We also note the visibility generated on some sites that have integrated the Twitch player such as Sport.fr in one of its articles. This has therefore contributed to bringing a new audience to the streaming platform that is still very much associated with the sole subject of gaming.
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Stream capture with Twitch chat[/caption]
Twitch with its subscription mechanics to support streamers and access exclusive content such as emotes to reuse in chats also has allowed to generate additional revenue for OM. 55k people now follow the OM Twitch channel.
In conclusion
A very good operation for Olympique de Marseille, which arrives on a new communication platform and reaches a peak of 99K spectators during the broadcast of its match despite significant competition in this niche with a French esport event (Trackmania Cup). This broadcast allowed Twitch to reach an audience of new users of the platform, enough to fuel the interest of Amazon (owner of Twitch) in broadcasting football, as recently with 4 Premier League matches in England. A broadcast mode that could take up more and more space and weight in the broadcasting rights of the various championships.
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