NBA.com Flips for Video During All Star Weekend

NBA Digital Senior Vice President and General Manager Bryan Perez says the NBA All-Star Game this weekend will once again provide the league with a great opportunity to experiment with new features at NBA.com, strengthen existing ones, and bring NBA fans around the globe close to the action at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

“With all of the social media features we added we can experiment, see how it goes, and then take advantage of what we are doing here in the playoffs,” he says.

A team of 45 people is on hand to pump video, audio, and text content to the site with the help of HD Flip cameras in the hands of players, tapping into the broadcast operations of Turner Sports and NBA Entertainment, and much more.

“This is our biggest and best event because we are all here on the ground and it’s intense,” says Perez. “But it is filled with content and allows us to show off what we built.”

The different events, from the T-Mobile Magenta Red Carpet with celebrity interviews, to Media Day, All-Star Saturday Night, NBA Jam Sessions with practice sessions, and the big game on Sunday night provide multiple opportunities to engage fans online.

Fans can visit the NBA.com Web site and vote on player cams that will follow two players each quarter during the game on Sunday. And there are the HD Flip cameras that capture video that is then edited at the NBA Digital facilities at AEG Live and then posted in the All Star Scene section of the site.

“We can really see what the platforms are capable of between the TV side covering everything and then using that to create content for NBA.com or the reverse, where NBA.com generates All Star Scene content and it is used on the TV side,” says Perez.

Alongside the extended All Star Scene section is a new feature called NBA Pulse. One of the hot trends in tracking the popularity of content on the Web is to build visualizations that represent how popular content is. The larger the size of the picture word the more popular that word or person is on the Web.

NBA pulse, for example, will track how popular players are in videos, blog posts, stories, and more and then build a graphical representation of the most popular topics.

“But we aren’t just building a visualization,” says Perez. “We are using it as navigation and aggregating content behind it.”

By using the image as a content filter users don’t have to try and figure out why a player or topic is trending higher.

“It allows us to use social media as more than just an outbound means of communication,” adds Perez.

Along with the online efforts are the mobile and tablet efforts on platforms like Android.

“From a development standpoint we are committed to being aggressive and we want to be their first so we can learn,” says Perez.

The NBA was one of the first to embrace the Android platform and its products are now on their third generation.

“We have as much experience as anyone else, if not more,” says Perez. “You have to commit yourself and we will do the same thing in connected devices and tablets.”