The Swedish Hockey League
Info
The Swedish Hockey League (Svenska Hockeyligan AB) is owned by the elite league clubs. The company represents the clubs and handles all their media rights as well as major, shared, sponsor deals.  

Aim
In order to maintain the strong position of ice hockey on the Swedish media market the Hockey League has taken full control of all distribution to and from all arenas by building a full SDI broadcast network. By getting full control of all distribution the Hockey League was faced with a number of new opportunities to further capitalise on their media rights.  To take full advantage of these opportunities they looked for a partner that could meet all demands from the new media market including fast turnaround of goal and highlight services for web as well as mobile outputs.

Solution
In 2004 MPS Broadband was selected to provide the Hockey League with an end-to-end media platform for IP-distribution. The solution consists of 6 in-coming SDI feeds, one for each arena were a game is played. Realtime conversion from SDI to iFrame mpeg2 and Windows Media Video. High resolution storage for automated transcoding to web and mobile formats. End-user services with highlight and goal services over the web and on mobile devices and delivery of prepared content for partner web and mobile portals.

Since the launch of the initial services more have been added where the latest addition is a User Generated Content (UGC) service where the Hockey League acts as the aggregator of video clips from all Swedish hockey clubs in a directory where every club is given their own WebTV channel.

Results
- The hockey clubs in Sweden are already on the forefront of web-TV. By working with MPS Broadband we are now able to provide a tool that makes it easy to publish and distribute exclusive material with coaches, players and others, said Peter Gudmundson, CEO of the Swedish Hockey League.

Since the launch of the services the interest has steadily increased. In December of 2007 around 100.000 video clips were served weekly. Links to the different services can be found below:

Hockeyligan.se »