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750,000 tune in to Wimbledon’s first live Visual Radio streams

Broadcasts from three live matches were streamed to social media through Grabyo

The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) has streamed live audio coverage of matches to social media for the first time, registering almost 750,000 views and generating direct engagement with just under 60,000 fans.

The Wimbledon Radio Channel, Wimbledon’s live radio broadcast of The Championships, produced by IMG and encoded by technology partner IBM, was delivered to Facebook using Visual Radio, a new component of the browser-based production platform Grabyo Producer.

The platform allows users to insert branded graphics, animations or visualisations into the stream. Editors can also insert crowd-sourced comments, conduct live polls with fans and layer imagery and data within the frame to deliver an engaging experience for listeners.

Using Facebook Live, fans were able to listen to the ladies’ final between Serena Williams and Angelique Kerber, the men’s semi-final between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal and the men’s final between Novak Djokovic and Kevin Anderson. These live match streams received almost 60,000 comments, shares and reactions from fans, hosted on the Wimbledon Facebook page.

“The Wimbledon Radio Channel performs incredibly strongly across Wimbledon.com and our official apps, and to be able to extend that audience is fantastic,” said Alexandra Willis, head of communications, Content & Digital, The AELTC. “500,000 people alone listened to the Nadal-Djokovic semi-final which demonstrates our commitment to offering the best access for our fans to enjoy The Championships and engage with our content, and we believe the response shows we have achieved this.”

Gareth Capon, Grabyo CEO, added: “We developed Visual Radio to meet the growing demand from fans for live audio broadcasts on mobile and social platforms. Building participation and community features into the product was important, fans want to feel involved with the action whilst communicating with each other. The AELTC has led the way in what is an exciting new step for audio streaming, and we expect Visual Radio to play a major role in live social content in the future.”