The Digital Innovation Group (DIG), the largest independent group of digital agencies in the UK, has secured a strategic partnership with Ultimate Football Fans (UFF), a new OTT fan TV service pulling together the world’s biggest football vloggers.  The service soft-launched on MTN in South Africa in June and is set to launch on Android and IOS mobile apps across multiple territories in October.  The service will be demonstrated at IBC on the Arris stand 1.B19 in Hall 1.

The OTT fan TV service unites a dozen major vloggers in English Premier League football including Arsenal Fan TV, 100% Chelsea, United Stand and Redmen TV, capitalizing on the huge success of these influencers who live-broadcast commentary via social platforms after every big football match. From April 2017 onwards, Arsenal Fan TV alone overtook both Copa 90 and Kick, achieving 10m more views, showing the demand for this authentic, honest and often startlingly frank commentary. These vloggers between them already account for 55 million monthly views across social platforms and UFF is uniting them and providing them with the equipment and delivery infrastructure that can roll-out video content to operators and broadcasters from around the world, bringing the voice of the fans to new mass audiences.

The service soft-launched on MTN in South Africa in June as an add-on subscription available to MTN’s 29 million subscriber base.  Since its launch the UFF vloggers have been creating bespoke content for the African audience and uploading new content on a daily basis.  Within three months of launch the service had become the second largest subscribed-to service within the MTN ‘Shorts’ content hub, doubling subscriptions on a month by month basis with users paying 1 ZAR a day to access the content, showing the thirst for fresh and unique content around the English Premier League Football league in the country.

Rob Walk, CEO of DIG, said, “All operators are looking for good football content but it is all tied-up in countries by the predominant pay-TV operators.  We are building a service that gives a chance to provide good football content in high-demand. We’re excited to bring our knowledge of multi-screen apps and digital design to build a truly outstanding service for UFF. We’ll be exhibiting this service at IBC with Arris on their stand in Hall 1, showing how this content can be provided to operators as an app on TV similar to Youtube and Netflix.”

There are further roll-outs to other operators and broadcasters planned for later in the year, with the next major initiative being the integration into global broadcast TV environments, which is being accomplished through an integration onto Arris devices. Arris are a world leading set-top box manufacturer with its devices already in over 1,700 telco’s, operators and broadcasters across 73 countries.

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