League club Westend Indians “Tribal TV” for video training, communication, and live games from Icareus video cloud

Helsinki, 23.04.2020 Westend Indians, one of Finland’s largest floorball and football clubs playing in the floorball league, announced an advanced Tribal TV video service for the 2019-2020 season. Tribal TV includes four different Live Streaming channels, an open video library for all, and a coaching section for coaches with training and educational videos.

Icareus ’first sports club customers date back to the early millennium and the world has changed a lot since then. The activities of sports clubs, including communication, have become more professional, social media services have become numerous and online video viewing has grown exponentially. Now more than 80% of internet traffic is watching videos.

As sports clubs have become more professional, it has become increasingly important to own their own brands and content, communicate effectively to their members, members’ close associates, partners organizations and fans. The training of our own staff and coaches has also risen in value. Westend Indians created Tribal TV (in Finnish “Heimo TV”) for these reasons.

According to research, social media consumes very fast-paced and short-lived content, while visitors to the club’s own website enjoy longer by reading, for example, news or watching videos. Westend Indians is now able to centrally manage live streaming and on-demand online videos from both its own websites and social media services using the Icareus Suite video cloud service.

Already during the first season, Westend Indians streamed a total of 155 different matches on its four Live online channels (AB Representation, C1 Representation and C2 Representation and other junior teams), all of which were recorded directly for analysis in the Icareus Suite video cloud archive and are available for free viewing there.

In order to develop the coaching activities, a separate “Coaching Line” video service was created, to which the coaches of the club can log in using their own credentials. With the help of video materials, coaches can study the situations of different aspects of the game, such as offence, defense, game tactics in different types of situations, as well as various supporting and technique exercises.

In addition, the service used to publish video contents of the men’s League team in the Tribal Warriors section and game highlight videos, as well as other videos of the club.

Westend Indians needed a reliable cloud-based video service for Tribal TV, with a public interface that would work on all terminals and be fully configurable to meet the club’s brand and website. There was a desire to provide exclusive content to coaches and other stakeholders, so the system needed to have support for content protection and login. Westend Indians produce hundreds of hours of content per season, so easy-to-use yet versatile tools were required for content production. With the help of the MyIcareus mobile application, content production, uploading and managing proved to be an efficient way directly from the halls.

Mr Juha Seppä, the head coach of Westend Indians comments: “Westend Indians’ brand and content are valuable to us. We want to own, manage and distribute our content through channels that meet current needs. Our own Tribal TV gives us a great platform to build our own Live service and content library for both public use and with the video archive behind the login for our coaching needs. On top of all that, we can monetize public content if we want, with payments or ads from our partners.”

Mr Mikko Karppinen, Director of Icareus, comments: “Sport is close to our hearts and sports clubs and sports federations want to be at the forefront of digitalization and content services. With the professionalization, the requirements for video platforms have increased and at the same time the understanding of the value of one’s own brand, due to which e.g. YouTube can no longer use the club’s main channel e.g. due to its license terms. Westend Indians have realized that with their own video service, the connection to the tribe is deepened and more engaging, rather than redirecting people to other services. It’s great to work with pioneers who understand marketing, fan engagement and the value of own brand.”

The parties are actively cooperating and Tribal TV is constantly being updated with new features to the delight of the tribe members.

Icareus Suite is an online video service (Online Video and TV platform, OVTP) that allows both companies and other content owners to manage and distribute their video content on all end devices. Icareus Suite is Europe’s most versatile online video cloud, used by TV channels, operators, companies, public organizations and SME enterprises. Icareus Suite offers a number of optional features such as live streaming, video-on-demand streaming services, customizable video portals, webinar events, social media utilization via YouTube or Facebook simulcasts, centralized social media video sharing, subscriber management, own ads management, payment wall to download videos from your mobile phone to the service.

Utilizing the Icareus Suite video cloud, Icareus also offers companies and public organizations a ready-made, but branded, secure and easy-to-use Icareus Enterprise Video service.

Read more:  https://icareus.com/online-video-and-tv-platform/ and https://icareus.com/solutions/icareus-enterprise-video/

Westend Indians, founded in 1992, is one of the largest sports clubs in the city of Espoo and the largest floorball club in Finland. The “Tribe” includes a total of about 125 teams and hobby groups, with about 1,250 tribes moving in yellow and black. The club’s representative team plays the men’s floorball league.

The Indians are the first floorball club to be awarded as the Star Club of children and adults sports. The Star Club quality program has been created by the Olympic Committee, sports federations and regional organizations, and its goal is the comprehensive development of Finnish sports club activities.

Westend Indians is also one of the six Finnish Floorball Association’s national team road FBA co-operation clubs, which has been accepted for all age groups. Eight players from the club played in the floorball different national teams in the 2019-2020 season.

More information: https://www.westendindians.fi/  

Icareus Ltd is an online video technology 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