European League of Football taps LiveU to drive viewership
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Editor
| 26 July 2023
As the European American football league looks to take further strides across the continent, the European League of Football (ELF) has approached LiveU to support expanded coverage, streaming up to six live games per game day on its digital platform.
European League of Football 26July2023
Working from headquarters in Hamburg, the ELF is growing in popularity across Europe. To start off, it had eight teams competing with plans to expand to 24 teams in 2026. The league’s live games are accessible to fans on ELF's digital platform via its Game Pass, with viewing figures said to be growing “exponentially”, increasing monetisation for the emerging sport.

In its broadcast, LiveU IP-video EcoSystem solutions are enabling a cloud production for Multi-cam and LU800 field encoders are being used in the required locations with LiveU SmartData providing data management with terabyte capacity. The live production is being managed entirely in the cloud by German production house, novel.media, from its Munich office. LiveU's German partner netorium prepares the units and provides on-site support.

This is the second year that novel.media has been using LiveU technology for its ELF coverage. In 2022, the games were all produced on-site, and transmission was being handled by LiveU’s bonded cellular encoders. LiveU says novel.media has taken its production to a new level, moving the entire production chain into an AWS cloud environment. The EcoSystem’s scalability allows the production team to add units as needed, and its architecture enables live signals to be integrated with ELF's existing Vizrt's Viz production tools.

“Scaling the live production wouldn't have been possible without the flexibility offered by LiveU and, together with novel.media, we can add as many LiveU units as we need to the cloud production,” commented European League of Football CEO Zeljko Karajica. “We can create more creative live content with minimal cost and effort, increasing our revenues. Providing accessibility to more games, we're continually building our audience as fans can follow their favourite teams on a weekly basis.”