How Dizplai helped Sky Sports News Fan Club turn viewers into active contributors
Key insights
- Dizplai built a single moderated workflow for Sky Sports News Fan Club that captured fan voice notes, text, imagery, and WhatsApp messages and displayed them live on air through bespoke broadcast graphics
- Thousands of fan messages were received on launch day alone, with momentum sustained throughout the season including typically quieter international break periods
- Regular episodes attract hundreds of WhatsApp messages, giving the production team a reliable stream of fan-generated talking points for every show
- Peak engagement moments included marquee launch week shows and major news events such as Manchester United’s cup exit, demonstrating the format’s ability to scale with the news cycle
- Sky Sports expanded the format beyond Fan Club to Soccer Saturday FANZONE, validating the model across multiple shows and audiences
See how Dizplai built the fan participation infrastructure behind Sky Sports News Fan Club, enabling real-time voice notes, WhatsApp contributions, and social media submissions to be moderated and broadcast live on air.
What Sky Sports News needed: a fan participation format that made viewers part of the show
Sky Sports News launched Fan Club with an ambitious goal. They didn’t want another talk show for fans just to watch, they wanted their audience to actively drive the content. Sky Sports News wanted to design and build an interactive media infrastructure that could capture, moderate, and display fan submissions across multiple formats whilst maintaining broadcast quality. These included voice notes, text, and imagery, which enabled the production team to react to audience sentiment in real-time.
How Dizplai built a live fan engagement workflow for Fan Club
Dizplai designed and deployed a fan participation infrastructure for Fan Club, integrating voicenote technology, multi-platform social media feeds (including WhatsApp), bespoke HTML graphics, and studio screen displays into a single moderated workflow. Fans could submit content through their preferred channels, whilst the production team curated and displayed contributions live on air through dynamic broadcast graphics. Dizplai enabled presenters to respond directly to fan submissions, turning reactions into genuine dialogue. Following Fan Club’s success, Sky Sports rolled out the format across other shows including Soccer Saturday FANZONE, which demonstrated the model’s versatility.
The results: thousands of submissions, sustained momentum, and a format Sky Sports has since expanded
The format transformed how Sky Sports engages with its audience by demonstrating clearly that fans want more than a broadcast to watch:
- Thousands of messages received on launch day
- Momentum sustained consistently since launch, including through typically quieter international break periods when audience participation on sports shows usually drops
- Hundreds of WhatsApp messages per episode give the production team a reliable, fan-generated pool of talking points for every show
- Peak engagement hits for marquee shows during launch week and major moments like Manchester United’s shock cup exit
- Sky Sports’ decision to expand the interactive format across additional programming validates both the audience appetite and commercial sustainability of fan-led broadcasting
Daniel Wimbush, Operational Delivery Manager for Sky Sports News, had this to say about the campaign:
“Partnering with Dizplai has transformed the way Sky Sports News connects with our audience across linear and social platforms. We can now capture real-time reactions to the day’s biggest talking points, with viewers able to respond directly to our studio guests through text, voice notes, and video. This collaboration allows us to bring fans and customers even closer to the stories they care about most, helping us get to the heart of the issues they feel most passionate about.”
FAQs
Dizplai designed and built the fan participation infrastructure for Sky Sports News Fan Club, integrating voice note technology, WhatsApp, multi-platform social media feeds, and bespoke HTML broadcast graphics into a single moderated production workflow. This allowed fans to submit content through whichever channel they preferred, with the production team curating and displaying contributions live on air in real time.
Dizplai’s approach connects the audience’s preferred submission channels, including WhatsApp, social media, and voice notes, into a single backstage workflow that the production team can moderate and curate during the show. Approved contributions are pulled directly into broadcast graphics, letting presenters respond to fan messages as part of the live programme rather than as a separate digital layer. The result is a show where fans genuinely influence the content rather than simply reacting to it.
Fan Club is a show on Sky Sports News built around direct audience participation. Rather than traditional punditry, the format puts fan voices at the centre of the content, with viewers submitting reactions, questions, and responses via WhatsApp, voice notes, and social media that are featured live on air. Dizplai provides the technology and workflow infrastructure that makes this possible at broadcast quality.
Yes. Following Fan Club’s success, Sky Sports rolled out the format to Soccer Saturday FANZONE, demonstrating that the audience participation model works across different programme formats and not just as a standalone experiment. The expansion reflects the commercial and editorial case for fan-led broadcasting as an ongoing format rather than a one-off.
Yes. Dizplai has delivered similar fan engagement infrastructure for a range of broadcasters and media networks, adapting the moderation workflow, submission channels, and broadcast graphics to suit each show’s format and audience. The Sky Sports model scales from flagship programmes to smaller shows, and from linear broadcast to digital-first formats.
- Tags: Media Networks, Sports
