FIS provides athletes and NSAs with free-of-charge, social media-ready competition footage

While the northern hemisphere is still in its last days of summer, the FIS World Cup season has already started for Freeski Halfpipe and Snowboard Park & Pipe, which competed at the Winter Games NZ 2024 in Cardrona, New Zealand, during the past week. 

The fact that World Cup action was back to New Zealand after five years was only one of the outstanding news of the week, though: Cardrona was also the place where, for the first time, FIS provided all athletes and National Ski Associations (NSAs) with free-of-charge competition video footage ready to be used across their social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. 

Shortly after having finished their performance on the slopes last weekend, Halfpipe athletes could access the FIS Content Exchange platform from their mobile phones and download video material − provided by FIS, Winter Games NZ, and Infront – already cropped into both 16:9 and 9:16 formats.  

This means that with a couple of clicks, athletes and NSAs had their individual competition footage from the TV world feed, including commentary, available to tell their own stories on their own social media channels. The result? More reach and awareness for the entire snow sports ecosystem: athletes, NSAs, venues, sponsors, broadcasters. Everybody wins.

“A lot of us would go on YouTube and screen record our runs if we wanted to watch them over or post them on social media. But being able to download them easily, in full quality, review our riding and post them online freely, it’s amazing,” says Canadian Brendan Mackay, 2022 Crystal Globe winner who snatched the Halfpipe podium top spot in Cardrona. 

The amazement at how hassle-free the solution is was shared by Rachael Karker (CAN), Beijing 2022 Olympic bronze medalist and 2023 World Cup Crystal Globe winner, who finished third in Cardrona: “It was really easy to use the platform. I just scanned the QR code and selected my name, and all my stuff was there. I didn’t even have to search for it,” says Karker. “It’s super important to have access to our competition footage. TV footage is always the best one, and it’s hard to get it with the rights situation as it is now.” 

More to come

Making video clips available to athletes and NSAs is a fundamental milestone on the roadmap of FIS’ centralized digital platform strategy, which was unveiled in 2023 with the intention of generating growth and creating value on social media, in particular for disciplines with a younger audience such as Freeski and Snowboard.