49 THE LIVE LIFE LiveArena
Words by Neal Romanek PRO STREAMING FOR JUNIORS Pontus Eklöf, COO of LiveArena, was quick to realise the potential of the Internet as a means of distribution. He used this headstart to carve a unique niche in youth sportscasting across the Nordics
round 15 years ago, a group of Swedish broadcast veterans got excited about the shift from analogue to digital TV that was taking place in countries around
Eklöf says, “Quite early on we realised this wasn’t going to be the big game changer. We saw that the significant change was actually going to be on the Internet, not in the switch from analogue to digital. So we started looking at what it was possible to do on the Internet. We thought we’d get our usual production team together and we’d be ready to go.” But Eklöf and his colleagues discovered that delivering a production over the web was a dierent scenario from what they were used to doing in television. They needed bandwidth, storage, a whole lot of
the world. The digital switchover (still in progress in some countries) promised an increased channel space, greater opportunity for niche channels, new types of interactivity and a host of other features. But the new technology didn’t quite meet their expectations, as Pontus Eklöf, COO of Internet broadcast company, LiveArena remembers.
PONTUS EKLÖF saw that the big opportunity was going to be on the Internet, not in the transition to digital
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