Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

Today’s edition features a conversation with Nick Rynne, one of the architects of Seven West Media’s new streaming venture, Streamer.

Further down, a poor day on the Unmade Index.

‘The genuine home of community sport in Australia’: How Seven aims to grow Streamer into a national player

Seven West Media put its fledgling new community sports streaming service Streamer on the radar last month when its used its annual Upfronts event to announce a national rollout, led by operations manager Nick Rynne.

Gestated in WA out of SWM’s The West Australian news masthead, Streamer was initially conceived as a subscriber benefit, before management saw greater potential.

Streamer, allows viewers to watch local club-level sports games live and on demand. It provides a platform for anyone involved in sport to stream their game, with nothing more complicated then a phone on a tripod, although it will also support more sophisticated equipment too.

Rynne started out at Seven as WA’s digital sports editor, before editing news service PerthNow. He then took on the opportunity to guide the operational and commercial direction of Streamer which came via the patronage of SWM’s WA CEO Maryna Fewster and editor-in-chief Anthony De Ceglie.

Says Rynne during the conversation with Unmade’s Tim Burrowes: “They realised that there was something more to the program. So they had the idea to take it away and come up with our own platform sitting outside the confines of the West Australian, where we could put the power back into the hands of the sports.”

Clubs and teams - who retain ownership of their content - have supported the project “We saw that there was more value to be gained for them and for us by allowing the sports to run their own programs and get back what they put in,” says Rynne. “So sports leagues, clubs, schools can approach us to get set up on the platform, schedule their own games, organise their own production and start to find value in their audience.”

The initial aim was to give ‘mums and dads’ at local games the opportunity to set up a production very easily

“The club secretary or a mum or a dad has a phone and a tripod on the sidelines. We wanted to have an option for them to be able to stream too, which we've seen a lot of over the 18 months.”

The platform also allows leagues, clubs and players to create profiles upload games and cut and share highlights. Although the business model for SWM is sponsorship and advertising, there are also built in features that allow clubs to make money from the platform from their supporters.

“In the last year, we've grown from 76 clubs on the platform to about 265 now. And then beyond that, we're probably averaging about 50,000 unique users per month. That's primarily in Western Australia now. So we've seen the growth here and we can project forward to once we really get up and running on the Eastern Seaboard as well.

“One of the other validating factors for us has been the number of leagues along the journey who started coming to us, so obviously our early work with the wider community sports tier two leagues in Western Australia has started to get noticed over east as well.”

Rynne explains that the purpose of Streamer’s entry in the east coast market is to differentiate itself from adjacent players and focus more on user generated content.

“The next phase in our evolution and our goals is to be the genuine home of community sport in Australia. It’s our aspiration. Extending beyond just the streams to have user generated written content, podcasts, audio, as well as a social aspect where users are able to really interact and engage with the vision.

“We want to be the home of lean in content, and we want to really start to be a leader in that space.”

Editing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

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