FloorballTV – a sports streaming service success story

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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/ 

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Considering Video Accessibility

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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
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Icareus Video Cloud – New Features

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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

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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.

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FloorballTV, a new era in sports streaming – Finnish Floorball Association launches its own branded video service

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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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F-Liiga and Icareus launch new streaming and video-on-demand service for international floorball fans

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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

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“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 why you should build a video academy

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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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Icareus delivered Helsinki Channel, the new end-to end streaming service to the capital of Finland

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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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10 reasons: Why YouTube shouldn’t be used as a business or public organization’s video service?

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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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What is DVB-TA? (Targeted Advertising)

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DVB-TA is the new specification by DVB Project that defines a technical framework to offer dynamic ad substitution on broadcast networks. It is an good initiative to bring economies of scale and interoperability between different ad and broadcast platforms.

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