SportsVids.com is a free sports video sharing website/community that was founded in August 2007 by Wayde Marsico, Ron Marsico and Elaine Marsico. The goal of the site is “to provide a vehicle for sports enthusiasts of all ages to share their favorite highlights and videos with friends and family everywhere.” Wayde approached me about doing a review so I wanted to share a few thoughts about the site.
Overview
SportsVids.com enables people to create a profile and upload videos of themselves and their favorite teams and players. I like how the site enables people to search through the videos by a variety of categories (type of video, sport, level and country). Videos sorted nicely into three overall categories—featured, most popular and most recent. Members can also rate videos and leave comments on them and user profile pages. The site also includes a news section, blog and forums. It is monetized via advertising across the site (Google and others).
Contests
One unique feature of the site is that it rewards users for bringing new visitors to the site via contests and prizes. They do this a little differently than most sites. From what I’ve seen, most sites reward people who get new users to sign-up; In its most recent contest, SportsVids rewarded the users who brought the most unique visitors to their site, and first prize was an XBOX 360. Their contest page features a leaderboard, which is nice in that it taps into the competitive element of sports—people love competing to win.
Uploading Videos
I really like that SportsVids lets you embed videos, instead of just forcing you to upload them. Overall, the upload process is good, though I would like to see a few changes. I’d move the upload button to the very right of the horizontal navigation bar on the site and feature it in a different color so it stand out a little more. The goal of the site is to get users to share videos, so the more you can emphasize this, the better. I’d also give people the option to choose multiple cities/states for their videos to be categorized in; let people be as specific or general as they want.
News Section
SportsVids has an interesting news section, which aggregates the latest sports articles from the AP, videos from ESPN and scores from CBS Sportsline. I like that people can sort the news articles/videos/scores according to league. This news section is beneficial for regular users of the site, since it allows them to keep up with what’s going on with their favorite sport without leaving. However, people may be more likely to get general sports news from other sources, such as a league/team website or ESPN. It would be interesting to have some more unique articles and maybe an orginal/daily video here each day to complement what is there already.
Watching Videos
I like the fact that people can watch featured, most popular, and most recent videos. One thing I might suggest would be to show the full list of sports on the videos page above these categories (featured, most popular, etc), instead of only showing them when people mouse-over “Videos” from other sections of the site. I do like the fact that you can sort videos by sport, but would still list all the sports again at the top. I’d also have “Sport” listed as the top category since I think that’s the first criteria that many people would sort videos by.
When watching videos, the related videos section is useful and full screen mode is good. I also like how you can email videos to a friend or share via Facebook, MySpace or Digg. I would add a few other sports-related sites such as BallHype and Yardbarker. I also might give people the option to post a video response, if they would rather utilize video over text comments.
Blog and Forums
I like the idea of having a blog and forums that allow for people to engage in deeper discussions than comments sometimes allow. These are new features for SportsVids, so they’re not as busy yet as they will be in the future.
Final Thoughts
SportsVids.com is an interesting video site (a YouTube for sports) that has potential if it can get some more users. It could be a good place for sports content producers to put their videos if they find that their content is getting lost in the crowd at YouTube and other sites. SportsVids.com is similar to a few other sites, such as Sports Fananza and SportZu.tv (though SportZu.tv is more focused on youth sports and partnering with organizations to have a mix of user-generated and professionally-produced content). None of these sites is currently dominating the space, so there is probably an opportunity for growth here. The challenge is convincing people that they can be a good alternative to YouTube and other more established video-sharing sites, which may not be sports-specific, but still have a good number of sports videos.