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Talksport eyes location-based ad targeting for international output

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By Jessica Davies, News Editor

January 9, 2013 | 2 min read

Talksport is eyeing location-based ad targeting for its global football service TalksportLive following its launch last year.

The sports radio broadcaster, owned by UTV Media, opened up its Barclays Premier League Commentary to listeners outside Europe for the first time last August with the launch of a TalksportLive audio player via Talksport.com.

It later extended this by embedding the player within an enhanced Twitter profile page to bring live League commentary of Barclays Premier League fixtures to countries outside Europe in languages including Mandarin and Spanish. The player has also been designed to cater for the social network’s new mobile interface on Android and iOS devices.

Fans can access on-demand and live commentary of the League matches in English, Spanish and Mandarin via the main site, following an exclusive rights win in which Talksport's secured a package of international audio broadcasting rights for the next four football seasons last April.

The broadcaster is now planning to commercialise the service this year and is keen to explore different kinds of ad targeting including location based mobile targeting. There may be scope to include more granular forms of targeting further down the line.

Talksport’s head of digital development Matt Davis said the launch of TalksportLive has extended its international reach “significantly” and embedding its audio player within Twitter has played a key role in this. “We’re exploring multiple digital partnerships to extend that further,” he said.

“Historically we have taken one audio feed and distributed that online, but this has seen us distributing ten feeds at a time which can be a real challenge. We have grown the internal team substantially to deal with the additional content and the next phase will be to start monetising that,” said Davis.

Talksport claims three million UK listeners and over two million monthly unique users to Talksport.co.uk, with these figures tripling each week during live match commentaries.

Meanwhile its UK mobile app has clocked up nearly 600,000 downloads. It is now rolling out Android and iOS apps internationally.

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