After many months of blood, sweat and tears, PT SportSuite is delighted that our goal to positively disrupt the sport industry has taken a giant leap forward with the launch of the Bristol City, Bears and Flyers community apps, which are now available in The App Store and Google Play.

Bristol Sport, the custodians of The Robins, Bears and Flyers brands, have been a pleasure to work with and have provided an exceptional case study as to whether we could fulfil our promise to deliver an end-to-end digital ecosystem for sports organisations of all kinds.

The PT SportSuite team have drawn specialist expertise and able to leverage the advanced media platform capabilities from digital incubator, Publisher’s Toolbox to achieve the following Digital Media Transformation objectives in the sports industry.

STORE DIGITAL ASSETS INTO THE CLOUD

The PT SportSuite phased transformation approach saw us begin by migrating over 20TB of Bristol Sport’s digital media assets into a cloud-based digital media library – powered by industry-leading Amazon AWS architecture. Not only did this safeguard Bristol Sport’s valuable digital media IP, authorised users from within the Bristol Sport network can now access and search these digital assets from anywhere in the world, and any time, on any device.

INCREASE MOBILE MEDIA IP PRODUCTION

One of PT SportSuite’s key priorities is to enable organisational members to contribute more digital content to the organisation, thus increasing the amount of valuable digital media content coming into the ecosystem. By creating branded mobile content-sharing team platforms, Bristol Sport’s three brands – Robins, Bears and Flyers – have increased digital media IP production, with organisational members now able to capture and send content in a standardised and secure way.

CENTRALISE DIGITAL PUBLISHING AND STREAMING

The next step was to tightly integrate our digital-first CMS platform with Bristol Sport’s brand new digital media content archives, allowing centralised control of content distribution and seamless publishing to mobile apps.

ESTABLISH DIGITAL ENGAGED COMMUNITY

The rollout of this key digital media  ecosystem means Bristol Sport now have the means to operate like a modern media house, by seamlessly collecting, storing, managing, publishing, syndicating and monetising their digital content, and the latest step in this journey was taken with the release of the Bristol City, Bears and Flyers mobile community apps.

“The rollout of this key digital infrastructure means Bristol Sport now have the means to operate like a modern media house” – Lisa Knights, Group Head of Communications

Packed full of exciting content, including breaking news feeds, live streaming, video on demand, fixtures/results, team profiles, social hub and augmented reality scanning, mobile apps are the new digital home for Robins, Bears and Flyers fans. The apps’ unique Fan Zones allow supporters to contribute their own digital media to the clubs and participate in exclusive Fan Challenges via an easy-to-use in-app uploading facility, while seeing the contributions of fellow supporters in a dedicated Fan Feed.

The mobile apps ‘close the loop’ in Bristol’s digital content ecosystem, allowing fans, players and the clubs to come together to form a new, sustainable digital community in which clubs collect previously unseen and untapped digital fan media, while rewarding fans with exclusive content and brand experiences.