Poland’s Kanał Sportowy launching its own OTT service

Polish sports-themed YouTube channel Kanał Sportowy is investing in a direct-to-consumer OTT service that it says will allow for censorship-free publishing and extended flexibility in creating marketing opportunities for sponsors.

The OTT service will enable Kanał Sportowy’s community to follow the sport-related shows of Mateusz Borek, Michał Pol, Tomasz Smokowski, Krzysztof Stanowski and Maciej Sawicki across the service’s multiscreen apps, including apps on a range of Cconnected TVs.

Redge Media has been contracted for development of the video service along with additional live features to foster community.

Kanał Sportowy (The Sport Channel) is an online sport oriented community channel, created at the end of 2019 that combines sport journalism and satire. The channel currently counts over 592,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Kanał Sportowy says that hosting its content on their its platform will help drive monetization, product delivery and new format activation. The channel says the move will also give it more freedom in choosing content partners and presenting their views, without appropriate content restrictions.

Redge Media, the technology outfit that supports the AVOD operations of player.pl and TV3 Baltics, will facilitate Kanał Sportowy’s moving of its content to its own end-to-end platform. Kanał Sportowy is also receiving support from the Arskom Sport Brokers agency, a specialist in sports marketing in the Polish market.

Kanał Sportowy plans to evolve and revolutionize their user interaction and experience.

The channel says that moving to its own OTT platform will enable it to offer sponsorship opportunities that previously were unavailable, along with more daily content, and it plans to implement a social viewing experience with user chat, commentary, quiz and interactions in real time.

“When the YouTube channel grows, it is essential to be fully manageable in terms of content publication and appropriate advertisement selection. Kanał Sportowy, arguably the biggest sport channel now on internet TV, had experienced several limitations recently, to which Redge Media perfectly addresses. Thanks to our native technology, there will be no suppression or business halt, all that remains is the energy and creativity of the host team, which seems to be increasing every week,” said Przemysław Frasunek, member of the board at Redge Technologies.

“For us, this was the logical next step. We are thrilled to continue delivering worthwhile and engaging sport content, and with sports as a whole being unpredictable, who knows what is next for our channel. For now, we are excited to start working on content which will expand our YouTube’s activities, with additional features being added that could not have been possible on the previous infrastructure. Redge Media has stepped up and provided us with the necessary tools to continue playing the sport game on our terms,” said Maciej Sawicki, president of Kanał Sportowy.