Helsinki, 16.01.2024, The Finnish National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI), in collaboration with Icareus, has launched Elonet, a new streaming service called Elonet+. This service is designed to offer an even wider range of possibilities to enjoy Finnish film production anywhere and anytime, completely free of charge for the viewer.

The Elonet+ streaming service is hosted on Icareus Video Cloud, making use of its wide range of features. The ease of cloud computing allows KAVI’s experts to focus entirely on curating the content themselves. Icareus Video Cloud enables content owners, public organisations and businesses to deliver their own branded video services securely, quickly and cost-effectively. In addition to the video platform, Icareus designed and implemented Elonet+ applications and user interfaces for various devices, including iOS and Android mobile apps and AppleTV, AndroidTV, LG and Samsung SmartTV apps.Thanks to Icareus Video Cloud’s API interfaces, the challenging migration project, during which thousands of Elonet+ video content and metadata were imported from KAVI’s various video platforms, was completed with minimal human resources.

"It has been important for KAVI to improve the accessibility of its films. The Elonet+, implemented in partnership with the Icareus people, meets a need expressed by customers and we at KAVI are proud of this achievement."

Pekka Tähtinen
Head of Digital Services at KAVI

"We are honoured that KAVI chose Icareus Video Cloud as the solution for the new Elonet+ service. It's great to see how it brings together a vast amount of national film, TV and other content history in one place, and makes it available to all Finns."

Toni Leiponen
Toni Leiponen
CEO, Icareus Ltd

The new video service is off to an impressive start – the collection already contains more than 350 feature films, with 20-30 new titles being added every year. Among the films on offer are the old, familiar Pekka Puupää comedy films, the 1955 Unknown Soldier, Pojat (1962), based on Paavo Rintala’s famous novel, and the true crime film Fraud (1988). TV series will not be ignored either, with a remastered 4K version of the Winter War TV series as its first taste. With around 3000 commercials, documentaries and short films, there’s plenty to keep you busy for a long time.
Elonet+ can be found in a browser at http://elonetplus.fi and other devices can find the apps in their app stores under the same name.

Elonet+ devices

The National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI) preserves and makes available Finland’s audiovisual cultural heritage: films, television and radio programmes. The National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI) is a government agency under the Ministry of Education and Culture, whose activities are based on legislation. KAVI’s statutory tasks include the preservation of films and television and radio programmes, as well as related research, the supervision of the provision of image programmes and the promotion of media education.

Icareus Oy, founded in 2001, is a growing and profitable Finnish company providing SaaS video cloud services. Our company serves customers from over 60 countries. Our main product, the customisable Icareus Video Cloud Service, enables the publishing of professional video services for organisations. The service is suitable for both internal and external use in various contexts, such as content services, virtual and hybrid events, communication, marketing and training. All this easily and affordably from the cloud, for all terminals.

Icareus Suite is the most versatile online SaaS video cloud service in Europe, used by a wide range of actors such as sports organisations, companies, 3rd sector operators, TV channels, operators and public organisations. We offer a wide range of features such as Live streaming broadcasts, Video-on-demand streaming services, customisable video portals, events, social media integrations, subscriber management, ad management, paywalls and a handy mobile app to upload videos from your mobile phone to the service. All Icareus video services are always brand-safe and can be customised to look like the customer with selected features.

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Presentation with further information about the service and its numerous applications.

Read more about the customizable Icareus Video Cloud on our website.

11 highlights of the 11th HbbTV Symposium 

Discover the dynamic landscape of television technology as we dissect the highlights from the 11th HbbTV Symposium in Naples, Italy. From broadcasters embracing direct-to-consumer models to advancements in HbbTV standards like OppApp, the blog post navigates through the evolving trends that promise to redefine the television viewing experience.

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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/ 

What makes a video accessible? How can you benefit from accessibility? And how can we at Icareus make achieving accessibility easy for you? 

Jatka lukemista

Icareus Video Cloud continues to grow and develop with great speed

During the past year, we have gained dozens of new customers around the globe from various fields of operation. They range from private companies to public and third sector organisations. It is our aim, here at Icareus, to be the leading video cloud service in Europe.

Icareus Video Cloud

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Icareus Suite Video Cloud is  a service platform running on the scalable environment and targeted for broadcasters, operators, enterprises and  public organizations to manage and distribute their video based content. Icareus Suite allows you to manage your Live, event and on-demand content, subscribers, content packaging, services, access control, user experience, advertisements and monetization on pretty much any platform.

Icareus Video Cloud new features

Icareus invests heavily in product development. We have published hundreds of improvements and numerous new features this year. Most of the work done on product development we base on the needs of our clients, in addition to which we do a great deal of “invisible” work to improve our service platform. 

Here are the top 6 new Icareus Video Cloud features published during this past year.

1. Icareus Studio video editor

Icareus Studio is a browser-based, easy-to-use video editor that doesn’t require you to install anything on your computer.

With Icareus Studio, you can publish brand-appropriate video with no previous video editing experience, fast and easy. Edit video files, take screenshots – even capture webcam footage for a video.

Icareus Studio

2. MyIcareus mobile app

MyIcareus mobile app

MyIcareus mobile app is a handy tool that allows users to film, upload, and publish video to the cloud with ease.

The app works on both phones and tablets, and is available for download from Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

3. Video and event analytics 2.0

At the start of year 2022, Icareus published a new video and event analysis platform, based on big data, for our clients to make use of.

This new solution provides its users with precise statistics of all views, watch times, and device types used to watch video, whether live or a recording.

4. Icareus caption tool

Icareus tekstitystyökalu

Before summer holidays, we rolled out the first version of Icareus’s very own caption tool – a tool especially yearned for by organisations following accessibility guidelines.

Icareus caption tool allows the creation, editing, translating and publishing of both captions and subtitles. The handy timeline and keyboard shortcuts make captioning easy, and text files can be uploaded to the tool to speed the process up even more.

5. Icareus chat/message board 2.0

Icareus is constantly improving already existing features, and a great deal of product development is based on client feedback.

One such long longed-for feature was the new and improved version of Icareus Message Board: among other things, liking and answering messages is now possible.

6. User access management

Our bigger clients can have dozens or even hundreds of admin users. In those cases, users are divided into different groups or units, with admins at the helm.

With the Icareus User Access Management tool, users can be divided into roles, such as main users, admin users and viewers. They can also be grouped up into specific teams, such as Communications, Education, etc.

Each user or team can then be given access to specific content.

Additional information

Wish to know more, either about features mentioned above, or anything else Icareus-related? Contact us. More info will be provided at our Helpdesk.

SalibandyTV_allekirjoitus_Toni-Mikko-Pekka-Jussi

In the picture: Mr Toni Leiponen, CEO and Mr Mikko Karppinen Development Director from Icareus, Mr Pekka Ilmivalta, Executive Director and Mr Jussi Ojala Communication Director of the Finnish Floorball Association. 

Helsinki, 23.5.2022, The life of floorball fans has never been as great as will be the following years as Finnish floorball association will launch a new FloorballTV and the F-League will be available on Sanoma’s Ruutu service until 2028. FloorballTV brings together all the other broadcasts of Finnish floorball.

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Kimmo Nurminen F-Liiga

Helsinki, 09.12.2021, The Finnish floorball league F-Liiga has released a new paid video service for international F-Liiga fans. The technology platform for F-Liiga TV is the Icareus Suite video cloud service.

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Making Freemium work for Video academy

“Freemium”—a combination of “free” and “premium”—has become the dominant business model among internet start-ups and smartphone app developers. It can also change the way users enrolled to your video academy.

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5 reasons to build video academy

2020 changed the way we do business, meet people and live our daily lives. One of the outcomes of the pandemic is the explosion of online events, trainings, webinars and live streaming as well as other video consumption. Zooms, GotoWebinars or Teams are no longer enough to produce a premium online video experience. Event participants do not want to install 3rd party software and demand for a brand safe environment. The time of video academy is here.

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Helsinki-kanava

Helsinki, 04.02.2021, Icareus has delivered a renewed Helsinki Channel service to the City of Helsinki. The Helsinki Channel is the city’s video communication channel and offers important and current content to the city’s residents. The technology platform of the Helsinki channel is the Icareus Suite video cloud service.

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Icareus Suite OVTP vs YouTube

Here are ten important reasons why you shouldn’t use YouTube as your company’s or public organization’s main video platform:

1. NO COMPANY OR PUBLIC ORGANIZATION WILL BE SUCCESSFUL ON YOUTUBE

Yeah, yeah, it’s known that YouTube is the world’s 2nd largest social media with 1.9 billion monthly users (01/2020).

Every minute, 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube, 30,000 hours every hour, and 720,000 hours of new videos every day. If you’re an active video-producing company and, for example, you produce 5 hours of your company’s branded, video content to be published per month, then that’s one hundred thousandths of a percentage (0.0000231% more precisely) of YouTube’s monthly content – now try to get attention for your content! So it is said that YouTube is a corporate video cemetery.

No one else on YouTube can do anything other than video bloggers, music, game videos, and “late night show videos” – no company has ever been successful on YouTube. You can check it easily by yourself from e.g. here

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