The Scottish Football League's latest venture, sfl.tv, officially kicks off this evening after two successful trial programmes that have seen the project team revise the potential audience figures upwards to one million views for the season.
sfl.tv is free to watch and has four separate channels in place, with the main channel, IRN-BRU SFL TV, showing a highlights package from First, Second and Third Division games every week.
The Co-operative Insurance Cup and The ALBA Challenge Cup competitions also have their own separate channels whilst the fourth channel, SFL Classic TV, will highlight action from The Scottish Football League's archive and will include League Cup and Challenge Cup Finals from the past couple of decades.
This week, fans will see 45 goals from 11 of last Saturday's games from the IRN-BRU SFL Championship by visiting www.scottishfootballleague.com and clicking on to the IRN-BRU SFL TV icon.
This week's SFL Newsletter is the perfect opportunity to speak to the people delivering what fans of the SFL have been missing for several years – a round up of weekly match action.
The company charged with producing the programme is Glasgow based ID.TV and they are twenty year veterans of producing industrial and commercial filming, although their leaders, David McNeil and David Cameron, would probably admit to being football fans first and TV producers second.
McNeil said, "This is a fairly unique venture where a governing body works so closely with a third party in producing highlights of their matches and the only other example we can think of is in Holland where the Dutch League show matches on their official website.
"sfl.tv is not on the same scale as 'Eredivisie Live' but the concept of providing footage of your own matches is the same. They took control of TV affairs after issues with broadcasters and after a couple of years of building up their viewing numbers, they enjoyed success last year."
ID.TV are based at The Hub at Pacific Quay in Glasgow's south side, and McNeil was asked to talk through how sfl.tv has evolved.
He advised, "As well as the ID.TV work, I have been filming Queen's Park games since the end of the 1980s and have worked with everything from one inch reels right through to the digital equipment we use now.
"We started talking to the SFL over four years ago about ideas we had for a TV station on Queen's Park's official website and how that could progress. We launched an internet TV service at Hampden and documented how it progressed and showed the League our findings and kept on talking."
The Queen's Park TV service was a bit of a test bed with McNeil saying, "We tried a pay-per-view service and we also tried broadcasting a full ninety minutes as well.
"Technically the pay-per-view worked well but we found that people did not like moving from a service that had been free-to-air to one they needed to pay for.
"We also found out that fans did not really want to watch the full ninety minutes and were quite happy viewing the edited highlights.
"When you added that together with the fact that there were people like me all over the country filming games for SFL clubs, whether it was for training and coaching purposes at a club or to show the footage on a club's official website, David Thomson at the SFL and myself began to float the idea of launching an internet TV channel showing and promoting matches from the SFL First, Second and Third Divisions."
McNeil understands that progress in football can take time, as he served on the Committee of Queen's Park for many years. The sfl.tv journey has taken four years with McNeil saying, "A large part of that time has seen concentration on redeveloping and redesigning the SFL's official website which was entirely the right thing to do.
"With the assistance of Craig Stewart, the freelance football writer, and Red Paint Multimedia, as well as all the hard work undertaken by the SFL staff, the new SFL website is in great shape."
Whilst the world of commercial television is seen to be glamorous and lucrative, this is one team who will not be heading off to Cannes with McNeil saying, "ID.TV is doing this at an incredibly good rate to get things off the ground and also to maximise the return to the SFL member clubs.
"We are dependant on the clubs for supplying the overwhelming majority of the footage and have been greatly impressed by the help and assistance everyone at clubs the length and breadth of the country have given us."
Whilst everything has been done to minimise the costs to the SFL, everything has also been done to maximise the quality of the programmes in place and McNeil talked through the ID.TV line-up.
He said, "We have pulled together some great people to work on this. My business partner, David Cameron, has 23 years experience of working on sports broadcasting programmes going back to the Arthur Montford days of fronting Scotsport.
"The graphics used are state of the art and the scripting and voiceover work is done by Keith Downie, who presents the Sports News Bulletins on Scotland Today.
"They are all delighted to be helping out and keen to make it work."
All 30 member clubs have been engaged over the summer to get sfl.tv off the ground and so far, around two thirds of the clubs are supplying material on a weekly basis with the remaining clubs working their way towards that goal. Clubs have engaged readily as they see sfl.tv as complementary and not in competition to the footage shown on their official websites.
McNeil added, "All clubs are permitted to show SFL copyrighted footage 24 hours after a match is played at the weekend until the following Thursday when sfl.tv will air its highlights package.
"Clubs can now show up to five minutes of match action compared to the previous agreement that permitted three minutes and of course, many clubs also show exclusive interviews with Managers and players."
To make sfl.tv happen, the ideal delivery of footage these days is virtual with clubs encouraged to send footage of their game over an electronic file transfer process called 'Dropbox'. Clubs are also asked to provide an edited copy of match footage rather than an entire match as this again speeds up the process to ensure a Thursday airing of the highlights package on sfl.tv.
McNeil added, "It will be easier to do what we need to do once everyone is using the 'Dropbox' system. It will be a few weeks until we get everything ticking over like a well oiled machine."
The trial programmes featuring The ALBA Challenge Cup and The Co-operative Insurance Cup First Round ties has whetted the appetite of fans across the world.
McNeil said, "We had hoped that the trial packages would get in the region of 10,000 views during the course of each week. However, numbers have substantially exceeded that figure and the two highlights programmes to date have also been viewed in over 100 countries."
The process and the product appear to have pleased the majority of supporters that have logged on to sfl.tv with McNeil saying, "Bearing in mind they were essentially trial programmes, The ALBA Challenge Cup and The Co-operative Insurance Cup First Round highlights packages have been much better offerings than we anticipated they would have been.
"We did not envisage that we would be able to include the number of games that we have shown during the first two weeks as we thought it would take longer for clubs to become accustomed to submitting footage by remote server.
"The individuals at clubs up and down the country have been great on working through everything with us."
Whilst showing eleven games from the opening day of the new League season is a great achievement, the aim is to provide footage from all 15 IRN-BRU SFL Championship matches played each weekend, with either the home or away club, or ideally, both clubs providing match footage.
McNeil said, "We showed over 40 goals from the First Round of The Co-operative Insurance Cup and will feature 11 matches showing 45 goals from last Saturday's IRN-BRU SFL Championship so hopefully, supporters will enjoy the official launch.
"I would hope that everything will be flowing to us over the next couple of weeks and by the end of August, we will have a programme with action and goals from all 15 matches played in the IRN-BRU SFL Championship."
Based on the success of the trial programmes, sfl.tv is looking to make a huge impact and McNeil concluded by saying, "We now reckon that worldwide, there will be over one million views of SFL match action during the course of this season.
"This is just a beginning as the internet potential is huge especially with internet enabled TV sets predicted to be in place in 100 million homes by 2013."
SFL Operations Director, David Thomson, said, "MG ALBA have been terrific backers for the Challenge Cup competition and a small number of League matches however, sfl.tv will see weekly on-screen action being available for the first time in several years.
"We are all excited by it as will, I am sure, club officials, managers, coaches, players and supporters."
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