FloorballTV – a sports streaming service success story
In the autumn of 2022, the Finnish Floorball Federation launched their own, Icareus built and hosted branded OTT service, FloorballTV (official name in Finnish: SalibandyTV). Its goals were clear and simple: to enable clubs to easily stream their games and monetize them, for the sport to have a single place for all video content, and for that place to be easily discoverable.
– The heart of the matter is that we genuinely are doing this for the Finnish floorball community and for the floorball clubs. The federation and a few stakeholders will invest in this, and when a club streams a game on FloorballTV 80-90 percent of the ticket sale revenue is automatically returned directly to the club. Such high revenue return percentages have not been reached before. In this way, clubs will have an excellent way to generate revenue for their activities, Mr. Jussi Ojala, the communications director of the Finnish Floorball Federation, explained.
After the first six months it’s quite clear that FloorballTV is a resounding success. Hundreds of registered clubs, thousands of streamed games, tens of thousands of registered users and happy viewers. The revenues have also exceeded all the floorball clubs’ expectations.
What, then, made the launch so successful? A number of things:
- The content is easily discoverable, and thus viewers have found it.
- It’s widely accepted by the floorball community; it is, after all, from the players to the players.
- The clubs and the federation have been actively promoting it as “our own media”. It’s also providing good sponsorship placements for the federation via display and video advertising.
- The streaming of games is very easy with a purpose built mobile application included in the service, which has led the clubs to actively stream their games.
- Paid games bring income to everyone from Division I to the “grassroots” junior leagues – with the clubs getting most of the revenue.
The community has embraced FloorballTV with great enthusiasm and will likely keep on that path.
The future roadmap for the Floorball TV service will add various features like scoreboards, integration to statistics services, subscription services in addition to pay-per-view, tournaments and using AI based automatic cameras.
Finnish Floorball Federation was founded on September 23, 1985. The floorball federation is a nationwide sports organization whose purpose is to promote, supervise and guide the hobby and development of floorball in Finland. Floorball is the third most popular sport in Finland after football and ice hockey, according to registered players (over 65,000 license players) at the moment. The Finnish Floorball Federation has about 800 member clubs. It is a founding member of the International Floorball Federation (IFF). Floorball is played in 80 countries and the International Floorball Federation has 75 member countries from all inhabited continents. The IFF has ranked 46 countries in the men’s series and 40 countries in the women’s series.
More information: https://salibandy.fi/ and https://salibandy.tv/
Icareus Ltd is an online video cloud and broadcast TV specialist founded in 2001 and having offices in Finland and Spain. Icareus provides video cloud solutions and trusted broadcast TV platforms, and our solutions are enjoyed by millions of consumers via our broadcaster, operator, OTT and OVP customers in over 60 countries. Combining online and broadcast has been the core of our activities over almost two decades. We’ve been making the change from linear TV to today’s multi-screen experience.
More information: https://www.icareus.com
Icareus Sports OTT is a turnkey white-label video cloud solution for sports of all kinds, team or individual, from floorball and football to tennis and martial arts. It offers versatile tools for the production, management, publication and (optionally) commercialization of sports videos and events. Both professional leagues and “grass roots” non-professional sports clubs can make use of this solution.
More information: https://icareus.com/solutions-for-customer-groups/sports/
