From the ISSF website:
Shooting Sport TV Channel made it to YouTube’s top-3
The ISSF Channel turned out to be the third most viewed YouTube Partner’s Sport Channel of Germany, last week, during the fist stage of the 2011 ISSF World Cup Series held in Concepcion, Chile.More than 12.000 views within a week, and thousand of spectator watching shotgun shooting finals & highlights every day, pushed the ISSF TV Channel up to the top-3 of the most viewed Partner’s Sport Channel of YouTube in Germany, last week (7-13 March).
Since January, the International Shooting Sport Federation shares TV footage of its main competitions on YouTube, in the frame of the “YouTube Sports Hub” launched by SportAccord.
The ISSF YouTube Channel, www.youtube.com/issfchannel, already offers a library of 145 videos, covering the main ISSF Championships of the 2010 season, and the full coverage of the first 2011 ISSF World Cup Stage in Concepcion, Chile.
Since the channel became operative, three months ago, it was visited by almost 40 thousand viewers, and more than 295 thousand of videos were played, making of the ISSF channel one of the most viewed sport channels on YouTube.
And that’s just the beginning. The best shooting sport’s footage of the 2011 ISSF World Cup Series and of the 2011 ISSF Shotgun World Championship will be broadcasted on YouTube as well, in the months to come. Highlights, interviews and full-length finals will be available for the shooting sport fans to comment, rate and share.
New videos will be uploaded next week, as the ISSF Combined World Cup Stage in Sydney, Australia, will start, on the 21st of March.
Sweet. Nice to see the kind of impact modern media can have like this – this is the sort of thing that gets the sport noticed by advertisers, and advertisers drive TV coverage, and TV coverage drives public opinion, and public opinion drives laws. So it’s good news for everyone in the long run, ISSF or not. And it’s a great direction for ISSF to go in, because it opens up our sport to everyone – at the Olympics, NBC says what goes to air and what doesn’t, and even with all the camera crews there, we might not ever get to see the footage. With youtube, you just upload the whole thing and let folks go see their sport.
And the numbers they’ve gone in proves a long-known point: Shooting, in terms of how many active participants there are in it, is one of the world’s largest and most successful sports, bar none.