Fox Sports Teams Up With YouTube Space LA For Daily Web Show ‘@TheBuzzer’

Fox Sports has a new gameplan for their younger, social-based audience. According to Variety, the company has teamed up with YouTube Space LA to produce a daily web series called @TheBuzzer.

The show, which had a pre-launch earlier this summer and is produced in YouTube’s 41,000 square foot Playa Vista production facility, plans to release anywhere from four to ten videos per day clocking in at around a minute apiece. The videos will then be distributed to the online video masses by way of Fox Sport’s YouTube channel as well as on FoxSports.com.

The short timeframe of the videos is key. The length fits in well with the “quick, snarky commentary” Fox is hoping to achieve and will also help the broadcast sports network better use the internet to respond quickly to fast-breaking sports news and trends on social media (a la a kind of SourceFed for a more defined news beat).

Pete Vlastelica, EVP of digital for Fox Sports, told Variety, “Until now, we haven’t had a video-based program designed to be quick and active on social media to promote stories.” Vlastelica also told Variety he hopes the show will be able to anticipate social trends in the sports world and be ahead of what breaks online.

It seems like a smart move considering where @TheBuzzer’s traffic is already coming from. Variety

reports that though the show’s 500,000 views per week aren’t overly impressive for such a larger brand, the majority of these (more than 40%) come directly from Fox Sport’s social media platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Google+.

Fox Sports has previously played around with digital video initiatives on YouTube. Earlier this year, the company held a contest called Fox Sports Digital VideoFest to find fresh sports programming it could infuse into its channel and grab the attention of its online audience.

YouTube duo Vijay and Antonius Nazareth of AVbyte ended up winning the competition because of a one-minute video consisting of sports musical clips. Vlastelica told Tubefilter then he almost didn’t pick the program because he wasn’t thinking broadly enough. “I mean, my small mind is the whole reason we did this,” Vlastelica noted. “We were looking for content that surprises us. I never thought we would invest in a series of sports musical clips.”

However, with last week’s hiring of Nicole Dabeau as a full-time host for The Buzzer (just in time for the show’s official launch before the 2014-2015 NFL season kicks off), it appears Vlastelica’s mind has grown to pursue bigger and more daring content for Fox Sports’ digital audience.