CURLING STADIUM FACILITY SETUP:
We’re installing cameras into curling facilities, putting 4-6 HD 1080p cameras onto every sheet. We’re investing significant funds into curling facilities to help them find new revenues and share in the profits. A successful Curling Stadium will revolutionize the way we watch curling from the bottom to the top of the sport.
If curling facilities can broadcast every sheet (and we believe we’re 80% there), there will be no excuse for the broadcasters to not get it done. And we’d love to be there to help make it possible too.
TIER 1 & 2: FULL PRODUCTION & SCENE SWITCHING
With 4-6 cameras on every sheet, full custom graphic packages, sponsor recognition, local or remote commentary, and scoring we can build out a full or partial production for your events and teams!
TIER 3: FRIENDS AND FAMILY VIEW
Day to day your club can have all sheets from all draws in all of your leagues streamed with little to no intervention or need for technical resources at your facility. Your club sponsors will be excited about the increased number of impressions annually!
BUILDING THE OPPORTUNITY FOR TEAMS:
Our group is working on partnerships with multiple teams. Our goal is to make streaming a standard for the sport so that fans can always watch the games they’re interested in and sponsors are continually able to promote their products and services and drive revenue to themselves and the clubs they represent.
Another exciting source of revenue will come from sport-betting and fantasy sports. If we are able to broadcast every game, betters will be creating more interest in the games and more resources for the teams. There will be sports-betting entities buying sponsorships on teams and events this season and it will bring more opportunity for our Canadian teams.
A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH:
We’ve been in contact with many provincial associations with our idea, as it’s something we believe that when shared amongst the entire curling community, the benefits will spread from new revenues inside facilities to the exponential increase of curling being seen.
As part of our idea, we want to help make it possible to have every provincial game seen, from Juniors to Mixed Doubles, along with full broadcast and production wrapped around the top of our game, giving those teams the chance to tap home-town markets as junior hockey does in Canada.
Facilities will be able to offer charity events that will be able to tap into a broadcast for live-telethon-style fundraising.
HOW WE DO IT:
We make this available to the club for their own leagues and bonspiels and then we work with the facilities to run events together.
And we want to broadcast it for FREE. To Youtube, to Facebook, to the team’s pages, and anywhere we can to build views. The audience now will support events that currently run. The trickle of views that flow in through the club systems build out real sales value from a sponsorship perspective.
CURLING RATINGS:
In 49 games broadcast last season between Kitchener-Waterloo, Regina, and Penticton, we saw over 600,000 views and 100,000 hours of game time watched. In the end, it worked out to nearly 1,100 minutes watched per minute produced. We didn’t pay a cent to market the streams and we still draw a strong audience that if we just replicate and sell advertising at the basic network rates, will see some benefits right away.
It will take time and work to mature the opportunity, but the estimates we use for advertising are what CurlingZone is earning now on our Google Adsense revenues. CurlingZone served up 18 million page views over 3.6 million sessions to just over 700,000 unique users. Even in the shortened pandemic year, we still managed 6 million page views and 400,000 unique users.
CURLING STADIUM TEAM:
Curling Stadium was a passion project that has turned into a real business with a number of partners already deeply involved. Streaming started for us with the 2011 OCT Championships in Oakville, the event that went on to become the Oakville Tankard.
We invested thousands of dollars in equipment and provided free streaming to the fans from many events already. We’ve spent many long weekends on the road and was always the last one to leave the building at the end of the event.
With the evolution of streaming and remote access now possible with new technology and better Internet access, we’re able to create a real business out of this that we want to see benefit the growth of the sport.
Our CTO and Executive Producer, John Benton (2010 Olympian, coach, and administrator with an IT background) took on the process of building out and testing the technical solution.
Cameron Rittenour is our CFO and Business Development Director.
Sander Rolvaag is supporting us as our Creative Director.
Rich Harmer is a technical resource taking care of AWS and website support.
We also have a number of operators and technicians assisting with site development, support, production, and event management:
James Gordon
Rory McCusker
David Owen
Bob Daun
Dave Traut
Aaron Carlson
Evan Jensen
REQUIREMENTS & INSTALLATION