50 THE LIVE LIFE LiveArena
things that hadn’t been issues until then, before they could fully utilise the Internet as a means of distribution. In 2005, they launched their first Internet platform, based in Stockholm, called MPS Broadband. The company became LiveArena, a specialist in delivering live on-demand TV channels over the Internet to any device. The company’s first success has been a global platform for delivering youth sports. “We realised early on that you could do live over the Internet,” Eklöf says. “By coincidence we started working with the Swedish subsidiary of Canal Plus, which is big in the Swedish market with sports rights. We suggested to them they might want to do live streaming with sports. They worried that to do so would be cannibalising their own rights. But the company was coming up for sale, and the owners thought, ‘Well it’s a not a good business decision in the long term, but maybe we can raise the value a bit in the short term by adding this live-streaming service’.” LiveArena (still MPS Broadband) got the go-ahead to live-stream one game of the Swedish Hockey League each week. “They charged more, at a lower image quality than the TV broadcast games, but it very quickly became their fastest growing business segment,” says Eklöf. The company began looking for other opportunities to expand its streaming service. This was a decade ago, with the technology still in its infancy. “The structure back then was you had to lease servers and capacity with operators. There were CDNs around, but
ON POINT LiveArena was initially hired by Canal Plus to live-stream one game from the Swedish Ice Hockey League each week
WE REALISED EARLY ON THAT YOU COULD DO LIVE OVER THE INTERNET
the cost was still quite high. There was a piece of the puzzle missing.” That piece of the puzzle fell into place when LiveArena began talking to Microsoft, which was just launching Microsoft Azure cloud platform with its Azure Media Services for premium video streaming. Microsoft debuted Azure Media Services with live streaming of the carrying of the torch for the 2012 London Olympics. “We took all our experience that we had acquired and moved that onto the cloud,” says Eklöf. “In parallel, we had been talking to the Ice Hockey Federation in Sweden – we had been working with them on their premium rights. We told them they had an uncapitalised right in youth ice hockey. They couldn’t sell the rights to a broadcaster at that time, but they could provide their own channel.” In partnership with the Ice Hockey Federation, LiveArena equipped 250 ice hockey arenas around Sweden with simple production capabilities, using mid-range Sony camcorders and Internet connectivity, and built a system for broadcasting junior and youth ice hockey. The result, aimed at family and friends, was a subscription service called Swedish Ice Hockey TV. “The service is still up and running and is broadcasting about every Swedish ice hockey game there is. We do 10,000 ice hockey games annually and have an archive of about 50,000 games.”
THE FULL PACKAGE Simple production facilities were installed in 250 ice hockey arenas across Sweden ahead of the creation of Swedish Ice Hockey TV
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